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 contributor 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, supports execution across cross-functional teams, and develops into 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 build a foundation in mission management and grow into broader program leadership responsibilities.

Key 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 alongside senior team members
• Monitor delivery risks, dependencies, and issues while helping coordinate mitigation plans
• Assist in translating customer feedback into backlog items and delivery updates
• Build foundational knowledge of Army mission environments, contract structures, and DU solution architecture
• Contribute to team documentation, delivery tracking, and internal reporting

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 Qualifications:

• 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+)

The listed responsibilities are not exhaustive and additional responsibilities may be assigned based on the evolving ne…