Defense Unicorns

People Operations

• Navigate complex employee situations with sound judgment, ensuring outcomes are fair, timely, and compliant with applicable laws and regulations.
• Support managers in building high-performing teams through guidance on goal-setting, coaching, performance conversations, and development planning.
• Build trusted relationships across the organization, serving as a knowledgeable resource on people matters including employee relations, compensation guidance, and career growth.
• Collaborate with leaders across functions to support workforce planning efforts, including headcount forecasting and partnership with Talent Acquisition on hiring execution.
• Support processes around career planning, learning and development, and overall performance management in coordination with the CPO.
• Cultivate a positive, engaging work environment that reflects Defense Unicorns’ values.
• Lead and continuously improve HR operational processes across the full employee lifecycle, onboarding, offboarding, promotions, transfers, leaves, and everything in between.
• Manage employee data in Rippling with an obsession for accuracy and data integrity across hires, transfers, promotions, and terminations.
• Partner with the team to enhance the onboarding process end-to-end, from recruiter handoff through pre-employment screenings, I-9 verification, orientation, and onboarding survey.
• Support leave administration from preparation through return, in coordination with People Ops, Payroll, and Finance.
• Support employees and managers on HR questions across the full employee lifecycle, escalating complex matters appropriately.
• Ensure HR practices comply with applicable federal, state, and international employment laws; maintain audit-ready documentation and employee records.
• Partner with Legal, Finance, and Security to support compliance initiatives, audits, and tracking of compliance training.
• Identify inefficiencies and implement scalable, standardized processes and workflows across HR functions, globally and domestically.
• Develop, document, and maintain HR SOPs, policies, and internal knowledge bases (Notion, Rippling, and beyond).
• Drive HR operational excellence through automation, system enhancements, and best practices, refining processes to be scalable and AI-ready.
• Actively identify and implement AI-powered tools and workflows to automate repetitive tasks, surface insights faster, and improve the overall employee experience.
• Ensure data integrity, accuracy, and reporting consistency across HR systems (HRIS, ATS) in partnership with the broader People Ops team.
• Lead and execute People Ops projects including process redesigns and cross-functional initiatives, owning timelines, stakeholders, and deliverables.
• Partner with People Ops leadership to prioritize and drive strategic people initiatives; track and report on progress, risks, and outcomes.
• Manage programs across the People Ops team, anything from vendor management to build new workflows to meet emerging business needs.
• Create, implement, and own operational people initiatives such as internal transfer processes, triage workflows, and HRIS process improvements.
• Optimize performance management processes, including HRIS cycles and compensation planning support.
• Analyze HR metrics, including turnover, headcount, engagement, time-to-hire, to identify trends and drive data-informed decisions.
• Build and maintain dashboards and reporting to support business decisions; provide ad hoc insights to the CPO and leadership.
• Dive into People data to answer questions from the business and proactively surface stories the data is telling.
• Provide monthly reporting to People Ops and department leaders on workforce updates and program outcomes.
• Lead and execute People Ops projects including process redesigns and cross-functional initiatives, owning timelines, stakeholders, and deliverables.
• Create, implement, and own operational people initiatives such as internal transfer processes, triage workflows, and HRIS process improvements.

People Operations Lead

Security Engineer

• Develop and execute the enterprise-wide information security strategy, overseeing risk management, governance, compliance, and threat mitigation to protect highly sensitive data, intellectual property, customer environments, and Mission Hero infrastructure.
• Serve as the organization's executive risk authority, the final decision-maker on security posture decisions with enterprise-level impact, and primary advisor to the CEO and senior leadership on cyber risk, emerging threats, and business impact.
• Partner with the CEO, General Counsel, and business development leadership to align security investments with contract requirements, growth objectives, and mission priorities.
• Represent Defense Unicorns' security posture in customer-facing engagements, contract negotiations, government interactions, and partnership discussions.
• Provide executive oversight to the Director of Security Compliance and Director of Information Technology, ensuring cohesion between compliance obligations, IT infrastructure, and security operations.
• Foster a collaborative, mission-first security culture, one that empowers Unicorns to move fast while minimizing risk to the business and our customers.
• Own and execute on a strategy for responsible, cross-cutting AI usage in all functions which enables Unicorns while maintaining a verifiable information security posture.
• Adapt Defense Unicorns application security processes to the AI-native threat hunting realities. Operate and scale bug triage and/or bounty programs that are compatible with Open Source software practices and the trends in responsible disclosure.
• Build and scale defensive security tooling that enables teams to shift-left and safeguard themselves and their work products, from emergent threats including software supply chain security, advanced security hunting, and advanced foreign actors.
• Lead cross-functional efforts to safeguard production infrastructure, cloud platforms, and mission-critical systems against advanced cyber threats, ensuring resilience, regulatory adherence, and alignment with strategic business objectives.
• Build and lead a high-performing security engineering function responsible for securing Defense Unicorns' production environments and customer-facing platforms, including architecture, hardening, threat detection, and defensive controls across cloud, hybrid, and on-premise infrastructure.
• Direct strategy for security architecture and infrastructure protection at scale, setting the technical vision while empowering the Director of IT to implement.
• Champion automation of security processes to reduce mean time to detection and containment, and drive continuous improvement across security operations.
• Serve as the executive sponsor for the Incident Response program, ensuring the function is cross-trained, playbook-ready, and compliant with DFARS 252.204-7012 government notification requirements.
• Own the enterprise Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) framework, setting policy standards, defining residual risk thresholds, and ensuring accountability across organizational units.
• Provide executive sponsorship for the CMMC Level 2 compliance program, maintaining accountability for DFARS 252.204-7012 and 7021 posture, POA&M governance, and C3PAO assessment readiness across all contract vehicles.
• Oversee the third-party risk management (TPRM) program and supply chain risk management aligned to NIST SP 800-161, providing final approval authority on technology investments with compliance implications.
• Serve as the executive interface for government regulatory agencies, C3PAO assessors, and auditors.
• Report on cyber risk posture, program health, and compliance status to senior leadership on a regular cadence.
• Build and sustain a security-aware culture across the organization, one that treats security as mission-enabling, not mission-blocking.
• Lead enterprise security awareness and training programs, ensuring all Unicorns and contractors understand their role in maintaining the company's security posture.
• Communicate complex security concepts clearly to diverse audiences, from engineers and operators to executives, board members, and government stakeholders.
• Advocate for risk-informed decision-making at every level, empowering teams to operate confidently within well-understood guardrails.

Chief Information Security Officer

Business Development Rep

• Build and maintain relationships with Navy stakeholders, program managers, and industry partners.
• Generate and qualify opportunities across Navy programs that align with Defense Unicorns’ solutions.
• Collaborate with Account Executives to shape opportunities early in the acquisition cycle.
• Track Navy priorities, funding lines, and acquisition strategies to anticipate where Defense Unicorns can add value.
• Share mission and technical insights with the Growth and Engineering teams to refine our offerings.
• Represent Defense Unicorns at Navy-focused industry days, conferences, and working groups.

Business Development Representative

Platform Engineer

• Operate and maintain Production UDS Cloud Environments (Kubernetes and the UDS baseline of tools we deliver to Mission Heroes/Customers), supporting teams operating within that environment
• Develop and maintain a secure, scalable, and observable environment based on Infrastructure-as-Code, leveraging Terraform/OpenTofu across various Kubernetes distributions (EKS, RKE2, and others)
• Implement and maintain CI/CD pipelines supporting the full software development lifecycle — compiling, scanning, containerizing, testing, linting, deploying, monitoring, and releasing
• Leverage a diverse set of cloud and on-prem IaaS providers (AWS, Azure, GCP, vSphere, Proxmox, LXD) to build robust, scalable systems for cloud, on-prem, and hybrid architectures
• Design and implement observability tooling — particularly stacks built on Prometheus, Loki, and Grafana — to help teams diagnose and resolve production-impacting incidents
• Participate in on-call rotation to address production-impacting incidents (business hours only for now)
• Identify and articulate gaps in existing processes, contributing insights to the product backlog
• Communicate complex technical concepts effectively to both technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Work within an Agile framework in a remote environment

Platform Engineer – Secret/Top Secret

Full-stack Engineer

• Building interfaces for managing individual assets and large fleets of systems
• Designing and implementing data-rich UIs that reflect real-time and distributed system state
• Developing workflows for deploying, updating, and monitoring systems across environments
• Handling complex state management and asynchronous data flows
• Integrating frontend applications with backend APIs and platform services
• Improving usability and clarity for technically complex operations
• Partnering with UX to translate complex system behavior into intuitive user experiences
• Design and build scalable, maintainable frontend applications
• Collaborate with product, UX, and backend engineers to define and implement features
• Translate complex backend capabilities into clear and usable interfaces
• Write clean, testable, and well-structured code
• Develop and maintain automated tests (unit, integration, and end-to-end)
• Contribute to frontend architecture and technical decisions
• Identify and improve performance, reliability, and usability issues
• Work effectively in a remote, asynchronous environment

Senior Software Engineer

Product Manager

• Own the product vision end-to-end and be accountable for delivering outcomes across multiple customer segments, including software vendors, government evaluators, and platform operators
• Manage and mentor a team of engineers, including career development and performance management
• Prioritize and manage the product backlog, balancing customer, business, and technical priorities with limited resources
• Synthesize external customer requests, government requirements, and compliance obligations into a coherent product roadmap
• Build and maintain alignment with the Growth team on roadmap, value proposition, product pricing, customer segmentation, and customer needs
• Adapt product strategy and roadmap to accomplish company objectives and respond to shifts in the DoD authorization landscape
• Collaborate with engineering and design to evaluate tradeoffs between roadmap priorities and engineering effort
• Participate in customer-facing engagements, communicating product value and gathering feedback
• Facilitate agile ceremonies and drive prioritization, value delivery, and roadmap alignment across the team
• Stay current with industry trends in DevSecOps, regulated IT, open source, and the DoD software authorization ecosystem

AI Engineer

• Embed with strategic customers as a technical partner, working from problem discovery to solution implementation and customer adoption.
• Architect, build, deploy, and operate agentic Generative AI systems: APIs, data processing ETL pipelines, integration layers, Retrieval Augmented Generation, and context engineering.
• Work in cloud, on-prem, and edge/air-gapped environments to ensure software can run where the mission demands.
• Prototype and deploy systems leveraging the core products and design patterns of the Unicorn Delivery Service (UDS); bring back insights from the field for continuous product improvement.
• Scope, sequence, and lead delivery of solutions: define living roadmaps, set priorities, trade off speed vs quality vs scope, work across internal teams and customer stakeholders to drive clarity and remove blockers early.
• Codify reusable patterns for mission environments: build tools, internal frameworks, playbooks so future deployments are faster, safer, and repeatable.
• Act as the technical face to customer leadership: communicate effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders, build trust, manage expectations, and ensure successful scale and mission adoption. This is a customer-facing role.
• Ability and interest to travel up as needed to client sites, but flexible based on personal preferences.

Forward Deployed AI Engineer

Manager

• Serves as a Product Manager for the Navy Domain
• Collaborates with Navy Tech Leads to establish technical roadmap for Mission Outcomes with Mission Heroes
• Aligns Defense Unicorns’ Product Roadmaps to technical roadmap for your Hero
• Share and facilitate feedback from Delivery segment with Product segment
• Work with Tech Leads to establish an aligned Delivery roadmap
• Follow company best practices in strategies for building Delivery solutions
• Balance priorities from users, customers, stakeholders, and the team

Mission Manager

Product Designer

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to conceptualize and execute high-fidelity prototypes for mobile and tablet interfaces, translating concepts into user-friendly designs that align with our brand and business objectives.
• Conduct comprehensive UX research and testing methodologies to gather user feedback, identify pain points, and iterate on UI design solutions for optimal user satisfaction on mobile, tablet, and desktop.
• Help define early product concepts, flesh out the high-level workflow and micro-interactions of a feature, and execute on an effective visual design for mobile and tablet applications.
• Cultivate empathy for end-users across product teams & stakeholders by creating and maintaining user personas for mission operators.
• Collaborate with developers to design and build data-centered tools with intuitive mobile and tablet interfaces that improve operator and user experience.
• Create, collaborate, and iterate on user flows, user personas, user roles, user journeys, and other UXI design artifacts.
• Plan iterative UI design improvements that improve the mission user experience.
• Document UI solutions and contribute to the team's shared component library.
• Work closely with other product teams and designers to ensure seamless cross-product integration with all other UDS platform tools.
• Develop a deep understanding of disconnected operations, classification boundaries, and DoD operational constraints.

• Serves as a Product Manager for the Navy Domain.
• Collaborates with Navy Tech Leads to establish technical roadmap for Mission Outcomes with Mission Heroes
• Aligns Defense Unicorns’ Product Roadmaps to technical roadmap for your Hero and provides feedback to Product segment on Mission Need dates for features to drive adoption
• Share and facilitate feedback from Delivery segment with Product segment regarding Defense Unicorns’ OSS projects and productized services
• Work with Tech Leads to establish an aligned Delivery roadmap, using Product roadmaps
• Follow company best practices in strategies for building Delivery solutions
• Balance priorities from users, customers, stakeholders, and the team to deliver mission value in a scalable way
• Fosters an environment for Unicorn growth, mentorship, and coaching within the team
• Fosters an environment for Defense Unicorns values and principles to thrive

Mission Manager – Navy

Account Executive

• Drive new Mission Hero acquisition across the DIB ecosystem, ensuring alignment with Defense Unicorn’s strategic growth objectives and solution capabilities.
• Develop and execute capture plans, win strategies, and competitive positioning to secure new business.
• Engage early with government stakeholders, primes, and ecosystem partners to shape opportunities ahead of solicitation.
• Understand customer pain points, acquisition timelines, and funding paths across multiple branches of the DoD.
• Identify and lead teaming arrangements that enhance technical capabilities, socio-economic positioning, or incumbent advantage.
• Translate technical capabilities—such as the Unicorn Delivery Service (UDS), cATO acceleration, and edge deployments—into persuasive win themes.
• Support RFI/RFP responses with market intelligence, SWOT analysis, and pricing strategy input.
• Prepare regular reports on business development activities, track key performance indicators (KPIs), and analyze the effectiveness of various strategies. Use data-driven insights to refine approaches and achieve better results.
• Represent the company at industry and government events to raise visibility and gather market intelligence.

Account Executive – Commercial

Technical Recruiter

• Approaching talent acquisition with emphasis on candidate experience, hiring manager experience, best practices, and compliance.
• Guiding hiring managers and interviewers through the recruitment process with consistent and reliable communication.
• Preparing hiring leads/teams to review applications and resumes for identifying applicants to invite to the interview process.
• Preparing interviewers with recruitment best practices and supporting them through interview debriefs and the selection process.
• Analyzing and presenting recruitment information in a complete, accurate, and timely manner.
• Helping to maintain job postings, candidate data, and hiring statuses in our Applicant Tracking System and team spreadsheets.
• Developing experiments and executing strategies to attract, source, and recruit top talent.
• Attracting diverse pools of talent to our open positions.
• Working with the Marketing function to promote job postings and our employer brand on social media and job boards.
• Helping to create content for the company's developing Careers webpage.
• Corresponding and engaging with candidates; leading their experience throughout the recruitment process from application to hiring decision.
• Scheduling and conducting interviews.
• Communicating with candidates post-hiring decisions including offer letters, negotiations, etc.
• Confidently communicating the complete employee benefits package to prospective unicorns.
• Representing Defense Unicorns and recruiting at in-person events/conferences (note: this is an all-remote position but occasional travel is expected).

Engineer

• Provide on-site technical support at customer sites, integration events, field exercises, and demonstrations involving autonomous systems (robots and drones)
• Develop, integrate, and troubleshoot software components across distributed systems and autonomy platforms
• Support the design, configuration, and maintenance of communications infrastructure used in field deployments
• Assist in the integration and operation of command and control (C2) systems in tactical and semi-tactical environments
• Diagnose and resolve complex software, hardware, and system-level issues in time-sensitive field conditions
• Collaborate with customer engineering teams and internal engineers to achieve integration milestones and exercise objectives
• Document field findings, issues, and resolutions to support continuous improvement of product reliability and deployment readiness
• Provide feedback to internal product and engineering teams based on field observations to drive improvements
• Support pre-deployment testing and validation activities to ensure systems are field-ready
• Serve as a trusted technical representative of the company in customer-facing settings, maintaining professional relationships with defense stakeholders
• Participate in after-action reviews and contribute to lessons-learned processes following integration events and exercises
• Adapt quickly to evolving mission requirements and operational constraints in the field

Forward Deployed Autonomy Engineer

Data Engineer

• Lead a Defense Unicorns delivery team supporting our Mission Hero through a DoW prime contractor partner
• Serve as the primary point of contact with the prime's program management
• Own delivery execution and financial performance on a multi-year contract
• Partner with Defense Unicorns Tech Leads to ensure the team delivers mission value across platform engineering, DevSecOps, cloud, and SRE disciplines
• Manage a smooth transition from the incumbent contractor with minimal disruption to ongoing delivery
• Conduct a successful architecture review with our Mission Hero
• Establish a foundational operational environment to support ongoing mission delivery
• Build a productive working relationship with our Mission Hero in coordination with the prime
• Translate Mission Hero and prime requirements into actionable work
• Ensure commitments are met on time and to quality
• Own burn rate management and monthly forecasting against the contract ceiling
• Lead staffing plans, backfills, and ramp planning across option years in coordination with the contracts team
• Champion Defense Unicorns' values and principles