Mission Manager

EMPLOYER IS A CONTRACTOR FOR THE U.S. GOVERNMENT. THIS POSITION WILL REQUIRE U.S. CITIZENSHIP AND ACTIVE SECRET CLEARANCE. Role Description:  This role works within Defense Unicorns' Army Domain and serves as a mission-focused technical leader responsible for supporting customer success, delivery execution, and adoption of Defense Unicorns solutions across Army mission portfolios. The Technical Mission Manager works closely with Army customers, engineering teams, and senior mission leaders to ensure successful delivery of secure software and platform capabilities. This individual helps translate mission requirements into actionable work, coordinates execution across cross-functional teams, and serves as a trusted technical advisor to customers throughout the delivery lifecycle. This role is ideal for individuals with operational military experience, technical solution delivery experience, or customer-facing engineering backgrounds who are looking to grow into broader mission management and program leadership responsibilities. Responsibilities:  Develop a strong understanding of Defense Unicorns products and capabilities, including UDS, Fleet, Zarf, and supporting platform technologies. Translate customer requirements, mission needs, and operational challenges into actionable work items and delivery plans. Coordinate execution across engineering teams to support successful delivery of customer outcomes. Support backlog management, sprint planning, prioritization, and delivery tracking activities. Work directly with Army stakeholders to understand mission objectives, gather requirements, and communicate progress. Effectively communicate technical concepts and solution capabilities to both technical and non-technical audiences. Support demonstrations, technical workshops, and customer engagements. Assist senior mission managers in identifying customer challenges, future capability needs, and opportunities for expanded support. Monitor delivery risks, dependencies, and issues while helping coordinate mitigation plans. Partner with technical leads, architects, and engineers to ensure solutions align with customer needs and engineering best practices. Contribute technical input to proposals, technical responses, white papers, and ROM development efforts. Support onboarding and mentoring of team members. Participate in hiring activities, candidate interviews, and team-building efforts. Help maintain a high standard of engineering quality, customer satisfaction, and mission execution. The listed responsibilities are not exhaustive and additional responsibilities may be assigned based on the evolving needs of the organization. We are seeking a dynamic individual who is able to adapt and take on new responsibilities as they arise.  Required Qualifications: Hands-on experience with Kubernetes in production environments (Azure AKS, AWS EKS, or on-prem distributions such as RKE2, K3s, or OpenShift). Experience with Helm for packaging and deploying containerized applications. Working knowledge of GitOps workflows and Infrastructure-as-Code tools (Terraform, OpenTofu). Familiarity with hybrid cloud architectures, including networking, RBAC, and storage for cloud and on-prem clusters. Understanding of DevSecOps/DevOps principles and CI/CD pipelines (GitLab or GitHub). Experience working with or supporting the U.S. Army, Army Software Factory, or similar DoD software organizations. Strong communication skills and effectiveness in a fully remote team environment. Self-motivated and able to work independently with minimal supervision. Willingness to travel as needed for on-site training and support. Preferred Experience div]:bg-bg-000/50 [&_pre>div]:border-0.5 [&_pre>div]:border-border-400 [&_.ignore-pre-bg>div]:bg-transparent [&_.standard-markdown_:is(p,blockquote,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6)]:pl-2 [&_.standard-markdown_:is(p,blockquote,ul,ol,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6)]:pr-8 [&_.progressive-markdown_:is(p,blockquote,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6)]:pl-2 [&_.progressive-markdown_:is(p,blockquote,ul,ol,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6)]:pr-8"> _*]:min-w-0 gap-3 standard-markdown"> Experience with system image creation, architecture design, and deployment pipelines. Experience with Zarf, UDS, or similar air-gapped deployment tooling. Comfortable serving as a primary customer-facing technical resource, including production support and platform guidance. DoD IAT Level II certification (such as Security+). DoD Secret clearance or higher. What We Work On For This Role: Develop a working knowledge of Defense Unicorns products, including: Unicorn Delivery Service (UDS) UDS Core UDS Premium Fleet Zarf Mission-focused Kubernetes platforms Remote - USA $118,150 - $159,850  Who We Are Defense Unicorns delivers mission value by streamlining software delivery so our customers can focus on the most important challenges. We share a vision of freedom and security for the advancement of progress and innovation. Our commitment to this vision, and to our mission-driven customers, means a commitment to speed, user experience and optionality, without compromising security. Our team is composed of innovators, software engineers, and veterans with decades of experience delivering technology programs across the federal market. What We Do We create and deliver secure solutions for continuous software integration and delivery. Defense Unicorns consolidates the best practices for security pipelines, testing, and deployment automation in order to meet the high security requirements valued by mission owners. Our solutions are agnostic by design and we believe that growing a robust ecosystem of secure, cloud-native software solutions can help enterprise customers inside and outside the federal market buy and integrate software more easily. Who We Serve Defense Unicorns’ customers are mission-focused leaders across public and private enterprises. We proudly support defense