Business Development Representative - Commercial

OpenKrill; United States; Remote; USD 70,000 - 110,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Dental insurance

Vision insurance

401k

Stock options

Home office budget

Flexible time off

Parental leave

Training/conferences

Job summary

Defense Unicorns seeks a Business Development Representative to join the Growth team. You’ll identify and qualify opportunities, build relationships with program managers and industry partners, and work with Account Executives to shape opportunities early in the cycle.

You’ll thrive in a fast-paced startup setting with 2–4 years in defense biz dev, excellent communication, and a passion for linking technology to mission outcomes. Remote-friendly role with impact and growth potential.

Qualifications

• 2–4 years of experience in business development, capture, or sales (defense industry preferred).
• Strong understanding of acquisition processes, program offices, and budget cycles.
• Passion for aligning technology to mission outcomes.
• Excellent communication skills—building trusted relationships and clear written communication.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain relationships with stakeholders, program managers, and industry partners.
• Generate and qualify opportunities across programs aligning with Defense Unicorns’ solutions.
• Collaborate with Account Executives to shape opportunities early in the acquisition cycle.
• Track priorities, funding lines, and acquisition strategies to anticipate value additions.
• Share mission and technical insights with Growth and Engineering teams to refine offerings.
• Represent Defense Unicorns at focused industry days, conferences, and working groups.

Skills

Relationship building

Communication

Growth mindset

Startup experience

Job description

The Role

We’re looking for a Business Development Representative (BDR) to join our Growth team. You’ll be on the front lines of identifying, qualifying, and shaping opportunities that align our technologies with Defense Industrial Base. This role is about building meaningful relationships, understanding complex challenges, and connecting Defense Unicorns’ solutions to where they can make the most impact.

What You’ll Do

• Build and maintain relationships with stakeholders, program managers, and industry partners.
• Generate and qualify opportunities across programs that align with Defense Unicorns’ solutions.
• Collaborate with Account Executives to shape opportunities early in the acquisition cycle.
• Track priorities, funding lines, and acquisition strategies to anticipate where Defense Unicorns can add value.
• Share mission and technical insights with the Growth and Engineering teams to refine our offerings.
• Represent Defense Unicorns at focused industry days, conferences, and working groups.

What You’ll Bring

• 2–4 years of experience in business development, capture, or sales (defense industry preferred).
• Strong understanding of acquisition processes, program offices, and budget cycles.
• Passion for aligning technology to mission outcomes.
• Excellent communication skills—both in building trusted relationships and in clear, concise written communication.
• Growth mindset, curiosity, and a bias for action.
• Ability to thrive in a fast-paced, dynamic, and highly collaborative startup environment.

Why You’ll Love This Role

• Impact: Your work directly accelerates the ability to deliver secure software to the fleet.
• Mission-driven team: Work alongside technologists, veterans, and innovators united by a shared mission.
• Flexibility: Remote-first culture with the autonomy to work where you’re most effective.
• Growth: Opportunities to expand your skills across business development, capture, and strategy.
• Culture: We lead with kindness, trust, and speed—and we mean it.

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

Benefits Our Unicorns Enjoy

Health:

• Medical/Dental/Vision
• Premiums are 100% Company Paid
• Health Savings Account
• Life Insurance
• Disability Insurance

Financial:

• 401k Retirement Plan
• Company Stock Options
• Home Office Budget

Leave:

• We offer all full-time Unicorns 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)

Don’t have all the preferred experience or qualifications? Studies show that underrepresented groups like women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs if they don't match every requirement listed.

At Defense Unicorns, we're committed to diversity. If you're enthusiastic about the role but don't match every criteria, we encourage you to apply. You could be the perfect fit for this or another role! Defense Unicorns is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, disability, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, national origin, veteran status, genetic information, union status and/or beliefs, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local law.

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