Mission Director - Autonomous and Unmanned Systems

As the Mission Director for the Autonomous and Unmanned Systems Domain within the Federal Business Unit at Defense Unicorns, you will focus on ensuring customer retention, satisfaction, long-term success, and account expansion. This role emphasizes relationship management, hero happiness, and accelerating time to value for mission partners. By proactively addressing customer needs, driving both product development and adoption, and serving as a trusted advisor to senior DoW leaders and warfighters, you will maintain high retention rates, build advocacy, and iteratively grow the domain.

Responsibilities

• Customer Retention & Satisfaction
  • Build and maintain relationships with mission heroes to ensure satisfaction and alignment with their mission outcomes.
  • Maintain a minimum 90% revenue retention rate by addressing customer needs, resolving issues promptly, and maintaining high engagement.
• Time-to-Value & Adoption
  • Guide prototype development and adoption toward customers’ operational capability goals.
  • Ensure a positive onboarding experience and expedited time-to-value for new customers.
  • Promote adoption of Defense Unicorns’ products and solutions to meet and exceed mission objectives.
  • Facilitate retrospectives upon achieving time-to-value to capture lessons learned and improve future processes.
• Hero (Customer) Advocacy & Health
  • Serve as a trusted advisor, advocating for solutions that meet both immediate and long-term goals.
  • Maintain a high hero health score by regularly engaging with partners and reinforcing value.
  • Provide regular updates to heroes regarding progress on feedback and new features/benefits.
• Account Expansion
  • Identify expansion opportunities within current hero accounts and maximize contract value.
  • Modify existing contracts to capture new scope when necessary.
  • Scope contracts to provide flexibility and allow for expansion, focusing on licenses.
  • Identify opportunities for cross-selling to adjacent programs and partner with domain Account Executives.
• Collaborative Product Development
  • Translate data and UxS capability gaps into achievable product development milestones.
  • Relay customer feedback to the Product team to prioritize relevant features or fixes.
  • Advocate for domain-specific enhancements to improve customer experience and retention.
• Metrics & Reporting
  • Track and report KPIs, including retention rates, hero health scores, time-to-value, and adoption success.
  • Achieve an 80% retention target for domain revenue and maintain a low churn rate.
  • Conduct quarterly business reviews (QBRs) to highlight progress and align on future goals.
  • Champion customer needs across internal teams to ensure mission success and continued satisfaction.
  • Balance time-to-value and gross profit margins, leaning toward TTV initially to ensure contract renewal, then maintaining >65% gross profit margins.

Travel Expectations

• 4-12 times per year

Pay

Remote - USA. Compensation ranges from $175,000—$215,000 USD, based on candidate experience and established using national benchmarking data.

About Us

Defense Unicorns delivers mission value by streamlining software delivery so our customers can focus on critical challenges. We share a vision of freedom and security for the advancement of progress and innovation. Our commitment to this vision means prioritizing 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. We create and deliver secure solutions for continuous software integration and delivery, consolidating best practices for security pipelines, testing, and deployment automation to meet high-security requirements.

Our solutions are agnostic by design, and we believe in growing a robust ecosystem of secure, cloud-native software solutions to help enterprise customers buy and integrate software more easily. We serve mission-focused leaders across public and private enterprises, proudly supporting defense and civil agencies across the U.S. government.

We work on:

• Kubernetes
• Cloud Environments (AWS/GCP and Azure)
• Infrastructure-as-code (Terraform/Pulumi)
• Continuous Delivery and automation tooling
• GitOps
• Containers
• CNCF projects and open-source products
• Helm/Kustomize
• Value Stream Mapping
• Building and improving security delivery
• Building Kubernetes and cloud-native applications

Benefits

• Health Benefits
  • Medical, Dental, and Vision (100% company-paid premiums)
  • Health Savings Account
  • Life Insurance
  • Disability Insurance
• Financial
  • 401k Retirement Plan
  • Company Stock Options
  • Home Office Budget
• Leave
  • Flexible Time Off (FTO) plus all Federal Holidays, one week for Thanksgiving, and two weeks for Christmas and New Year’s
  • Paid Parental Leave
• Learning
  • Reimbursement for approved trainings/subscriptions
  • Conferences (travel, lodging, and fees covered)