Senior 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 driving customer success, delivery execution, and adoption of Defense Unicorns solutions across Army mission portfolios.

The Senior 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 owns the translation of mission requirements into actionable work, drives 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 significant operational military experience, technical solution delivery experience, or customer-facing engineering backgrounds who can own mission outcomes independently and help shape the direction of Army delivery efforts.

Key Responsibilities:

• Develop and maintain deep expertise in 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
• Own mission outcomes and delivery execution with minimal oversight
• Manage 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
• Drive identification of customer challenges, future capability needs, and opportunities for expanded support
• Monitor delivery risks, dependencies, and issues while coordinating 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
• Serve as a trusted technical advisor to customers throughout the delivery lifecycle

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 certi…