Defense Sales Lead

Parallel Works; Chicago (IL); On-site; USD 120,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical coverage

Vision coverage

Dental coverage

401(k) with company match

Short term disability

Generous paid vacation and sick time

Sales commission

Job summary

Parallel Works is seeking a Defense Sales Lead in the United States to create pipeline and drive capture across the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community. The role covers proposals, program offices, and teaming for our IL5 platform and related services.

You would work with the CEO, Director of Sales, and Director of Operations on contracts and compliance, navigating federal acquisition and government contracting while building long-term customer relationships.

Qualifications

• 10+ years selling technology or services into the DoD/IC with awards you personally sourced and closed.
• Working fluency in Federal acquisition: full and open competition, prototypes OTAs, BAA/GAO-type processes.
• Relationships inside at least one buying community (laboratories, defense agencies, combatant commands, etc.).
• Sufficient technical literacy in cloud, HPC, or AI infrastructure to run a first meeting without an engineer.
• CRM discipline and forecasts that held up; United States citizenship and eligibility for a Secret clearance; we sponsor eligible candidates.

Responsibilities

• Pipeline creation: build and hold a qualified defense pipeline from program offices and industry events.
• Pre-solicitation engagement: meet program offices before RFPs, respond to sources sought, position inside requirements.
• Capture and proposals: run capture plans, teaming decisions, and deliver compliant volumes on schedule.
• Position the hybrid capability: explain ACTIVATE federating on‑prem HPC/GPU with Gov cloud and unified accounting.
• Vehicles and teaming: choose acquisition paths and develop teaming with integrators and primes.
• Forecasting: maintain pipeline trackers for win probability, timing, and reasons for slippage.

Skills

Defense sales

Federal procurement

CRM discipline

Clearance readiness

DoD/IC networking

Job description

About Parallel Works

Parallel Works builds and operates ACTIVATE, a control plane for high performance computing and AI. Our customers run large scientific and AI workloads across their own on-premises clusters, Government and commercial cloud, and commercial GPU providers, and ACTIVATE gives them one way in to all of it. The high security boundary is authorized at Impact Level 5, with FIPS validated cryptography and STIG hardening throughout.

The work reaches most fields that depend on computing at scale: weather and climate forecasting, defense and intelligence programs, aerospace and structural analysis, molecular and materials science, energy, and AI research. A quarter here can include standing up a GPU cluster for one of those communities, federating a laboratory's existing on-premises system with burst capacity it did not have before, and getting a domain code written decades ago to run on current hardware.

Customer success sets our priorities. We are a small engineering company, so engineers here work directly with the people using the systems and carry a problem from the first report through to the fix. This is what we call mission engineering: understanding what a customer is trying to accomplish and why the computing matters to it.

About the role

Parallel Works is hiring a Defense Sales Lead to create pipeline and run capture across the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community. Our defense business includes a platform authorized at Impact Level 5, prototype other transaction work, task orders with military service laboratories, and delivery as a subcontractor under large integrators.

This is a full cycle role: identify the program, build the program office relationship before a solicitation exists, assemble the team, drive the proposal with our technical staff, and stay on the account after award. Parallel Works has no separate capture organization, and you will often be the only sales person in the room on a technical pursuit. You would work with the Chief Executive Officer, the Director of Sales, and the Director of Operations on contracts and compliance.

What you will do

• Pipeline creation:build and hold a qualified defense pipeline from program office relationships, industry days, partner introductions, and our own opportunity scoring.
• Pre-solicitation engagement:meet program offices before the request for proposal exists, respond to sources sought notices and requests for information, and get us positioned inside the requirement.
• Capture and proposals:run capture plans, teaming decisions, and review gates, and work with the technical team and the Director of Operations to produce compliant volumes on schedule.
• Position the hybrid capability:explain how ACTIVATE federates a program's own on-premises HPC and GPU systems with accredited Government cloud and commercial GPU capacity under one login and one accounting model. Programs that own hardware and intend to keep it are the closest fit.
• Vehicles and teaming:choose the acquisition path for each pursuit, and develop teaming with the integrators and mission primes that hold the programs we want to be on.
• Forecasting:keep the pipeline tracker honest on win probability, timing, and why a pursuit slipped.

• 10 or more years selling technology or technical services into the Department of Defense or the Intelligence Community, with awards you personally sourced and closed.
• Working fluency in Federal acquisition: full and open competition, prototype other transactions, broad agency announcements, sole source justification, and what each demands of a small business.
• Pre-solicitation capture work, not only proposal response.
• Relationships inside at least one relevant buying community, for example a service research laboratory, a defense innovation or rapid acquisition organization, a combatant command, or a Defense agency computing program.
• Enough technical literacy in cloud, HPC, or AI infrastructure to run a first meeting without an engineer present.
• CRM discipline and forecasts that held up.
• United States citizenship and eligibility for a Secret clearance, since the work reaches export controlled Government environments. An active clearance helps. We sponsor candidates who are eligible but not currently cleared.

Preferred Qualifications

• Selling accredited software platforms, FedRAMP or Impact Level, where the authorization is part of the value.
• Small business or startup experience, where the seller also does qualification, pricing input, and follow through.
• Working knowledge of contract types: firm fixed price, cost plus, time and materials.
• Standing up or improving a capture process instead of inheriting one.

• Medical coverage
• Vision coverage
• Dental coverage
• 401(k) with company match
• Short term disability
• Generous paid vacation and sick time

The role also carries sales commission.

Equal employment opportunity

Parallel Works is an equal opportunity employer. We consider all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.