Mission Director - Autonomous and Unmanned Systems

Mission Director - Autonomous and Unmanned Systems

Position Summary

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 both seniors DoW leaders and our nation’s most experienced warfighters; you will maintain high retention rates, build advocacy among our heroes, and iteratively grow the Autonomous and Unmanned Systems domain over time..

Key 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 towards the customers’ operational capability goals.
• Ensure 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 a retrospective when TTV is achieved to capture lessons learned and ensure we are improving the process for future customers.
• 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 they are receiving from our products.
• 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 the most amount of flexibility possible and allow for expansion focusing on licenses whenever possible.
• Identify opportunities for cross selling to adjacent programs and partner with the (insert Domain) Account Executive.
• Collaborative Product Development
• Translate data and UxS capability gaps into achieve product development milestones, ensuring that Defense Unicorns’ R&D engine is driving towards relevant mission capabilities.
• 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.
• Expectations
• 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.
• Facilitate and socialize results of a retrospective post time to value achievement.
• Balance TTV and gross profit margins during the initial period of the contract, leaning towards TTV,  to ensure “stickiness” and renewal of the contract. After the initial TTV, maintain >65% gross profit margins across the domain.
• Travel Expectations
• 4-12 times per year
• Full compensation packages are based on candidate experience. Compensation ranges are established using national benchmarking data and apply across all geographic locations within the United States.
• Remote - USA
• $175,000 — $215,000 USD
• 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 and civil agencies across the U.S. government and we work closely with the creators of leading-edge software solutions to deliver value to the mission-owner by improving the security and consumability of commercial software products.

What We Work On

Kubernetes

• Cloud Environments (AWS/GCP and Azure)
• Infrastructure-as-code (like Terraform/Pulumi)
• Continuous Delivery and automation tooling

GitOps

Containers

• CNCF projects and open source products and packages
• Helm/Kustomize-Value Stream Mapping
• Building and improving security delivery
• Building Kubernetes and cloud native applications