Strategic Account Executive, Federal & Autonomous Systems

Defense Unicorns; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 145,000 - 185,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Health Savings Account

Life Insurance

Disability Insurance

401k Retirement Plan

Company Stock Options

Home Office Budget

Flexible Time Off

Federal Holidays

Conferences

Job summary

Defense Unicorns seeks an Account Executive to own and grow business across the autonomous systems and federal technology market in the United States. The role involves engaging drone manufacturers, aerospace and satellite firms, federal integrators, and defense technology companies to deploy secure software in mission systems and distributed environments.

Working with a Solutions Architect, you will lead from opportunity identification to commercial strategy and closure, navigating

Qualifications

• Demonstrated success selling complex technology solutions into federal, defense, aerospace, autonomous systems, or similarly complex markets.
• Experience developing and closing opportunities with multiple technical, business, and government stakeholders.
• Strong understanding of the federal technology ecosystem including customers, prime contractors, and OEMs.
• Experience building new markets or territories and initiating opportunities before formal procurement.
• Ability to engage credibly with engineering and architecture teams on technical concepts.

Responsibilities

• Own pipeline creation, account strategy, opportunity development, and revenue across the autonomous systems and federal markets.
• Develop relationships with drone manufacturers, aerospace/satellite companies, and federal integrators entering the market.
• Identify programs where cloud-native software, secure delivery, data transport, and edge computing create value.
• Partner with Solutions Architect to lead discovery, solution development, and commercial alignment.
• Build and execute account plans for strategic customers, partners, platforms, and programs.
• Navigate opportunities from initial conversations through contracting, deployment, and expansion.
• Coordinate with internal teams to advance strategic opportunities and craft compelling business cases.

Skills

Federal defense/technology sales

Relationship building

Executive communication

Account planning

Capture/Opportunity development

Challenging sales cycles

Tech-savvy / cloud-native familiarity

Tools

CRM tools

Contracting processes

Job description

Account Executive — Autonomous Systems (ComS056)

San Francisco and Los Angeles CA

Account Executive — Autonomous Systems

Role Overview

Defense Unicorns is seeking an Account Executive to own and grow business across the autonomous systems and federal technology market.

This role will work with autonomous drone manufacturers, satellite and aerospace companies, Federal Systems Integrators, defense technology companies, and commercial organizations seeking to bring their products into the federal market.

The Account Executive will identify and develop strategic opportunities where Defense Unicorns can help customers build, deploy, secure, and operate modern software across mission systems and highly distributed environments. This includes platforms such as unmanned systems, satellites, weapons systems, tactical edge environments, and the infrastructure that supports them.

Working in close partnership with a Solutions Architect, the Account Executive will lead customer engagement from initial opportunity identification through technical discovery, solution development, commercial strategy, and close.

The ideal candidate understands that selling into this market rarely follows a traditional enterprise software motion. Success requires building relationships across engineering organizations, program leadership, business development teams, government stakeholders, systems integrators, and technology partners while understanding how Defense Unicorns can become part of a larger platform or program.

Key Responsibilities

• Own pipeline creation, account strategy, opportunity development, and revenue across the autonomous systems and federal markets territory.
• Develop relationships with autonomous drone manufacturers, aerospace and satellite companies, Federal Systems Integrators, defense technology companies, and commercial companies entering the federal market.
• Identify programs, platforms, and customer initiatives where cloud-native software, secure software delivery, data transport, and edge computing capabilities can create strategic value.
• Work closely with the paired Solutions Architect to lead customer discovery and understand mission requirements, platform architectures, technical constraints, acquisition strategies, and business objectives.
• Build and execute account plans for strategic customers, partners, platforms, and programs.
• Develop opportunities from early technical conversations through evaluation, contracting, deployment, expansion, and long-term partnership.
• Navigate complex opportunities involving multiple stakeholders, including engineering teams, program leadership, executives, government customers, acquisition organizations, and industry partners.
• Build relationships with Federal Systems Integrators and prime contractors to identify where Defense Unicorns can become part of larger program architectures and customer solutions.
• Work with commercial technology companies to develop strategies for bringing their capabilities into federal and defense environments.
• Identify opportunities for Defense Unicorns technology to be incorporated into new platforms during the design phase as well as existing platforms undergoing software modernization.
• Coordinate internal resources across Solutions Architecture, Engineering, Product, Marketing, Contracts, and company leadership to advance strategic opportunities.
• Develop compelling business cases and value propositions that connect Defense Unicorns capabilities to customer mission outcomes.
• Maintain a disciplined understanding of pipeline, opportunity stage, next actions, decision criteria, stakeholders, competitive position, and forecast.
• Negotiate commercial agreements and drive opportunities through procurement and contracting processes.
• Represent Defense Unicorns at industry events, customer meetings, partner engagements, technical demonstrations, and other market-facing activities.
• Capture market feedback and recurring customer needs to help influence product strategy, partnerships, and go-to-market priorities.

Partnership With the Solutions Architect

The Account Executive and Solutions Architect will operate as a tightly integrated customer team.

The Account Executive owns the business opportunity: identifying the right organizations and programs, developing relationships, understanding the buying environment, building the opportunity strategy, creating commercial alignment, and driving the opportunity to close.

The Solutions Architect owns the technical solution: understanding the customer's architecture, identifying where Defense Unicorns technology fits, developing solution architectures, and establishing technical confidence with customer engineering teams.

Together, they should be capable of engaging a customer early—sometimes before a formal requirement or procurement exists—and helping shape both the technical architecture and business path necessary to bring a capability into a federal program or mission system.

What Success Looks Like

A successful Account Executive in this role will build a portfolio of strategic relationships and opportunities across the companies designing the next generation of autonomous and mission systems.

They will be equally comfortable discussing a platform roadmap with the leadership team of an autonomous systems company, developing a teaming strategy with a Federal Systems Integrator, working through an opportunity with a defense program, or helping a commercial company determine how to enter the federal market.

Rather than simply responding to existing software procurements, they will identify opportunities early and help customers understand how modern software infrastructure can become an enabling layer within their platforms.

Over time, they will establish Defense Unicorns as a trusted partner to organizations building and integrating software-defined mission systems.

Desired Experience

• Demonstrated success selling complex technology solutions into federal, defense, aerospace, autonomous systems, or similarly complex markets.
• Experience developing and closing opportunities involving multiple technical, business, and government stakeholders.
• Strong understanding of the federal technology ecosystem, including government customers, Federal Systems Integrators, prime contractors, OEMs, and technology vendors.
• Experience building new markets or territories rather than exclusively managing established accounts.
• Ability to develop opportunities before a formal procurement or RFP exists.
• Experience navigating long, complex sales cycles involving partnerships, technical evaluations, contracting, and program-level decisions.
• Ability to understand technical concepts sufficiently to engage credibly with engineering and architecture teams.
• Familiarity with cloud-native software, DevSecOps, Kubernetes, edge computing, software delivery, data infrastructure, or adjacent technologies is highly desirable.
• Experience working with autonomous systems, drones, aerospace, satellites, robotics, weapons systems, or other software-defined platforms is highly desirable.
• Strong executive communication, relationship-building, negotiation, and account-planning skills.
• Ability to operate effectively in an ambiguous and rapidly evolving market where customers, technologies, programs, and acquisition strategies are still taking shape.

Ideal Background

This role may be a strong fit for someone who has worked as an Enterprise Account Executive, Strategic Account Executive, Federal Account Executive, Defense Technology Business Development Executive, Capture Manager, or sales leader serving defense, aerospace, autonomous systems, or emerging technology markets.

The strongest candidates will combine the discipline of an enterprise seller with the market-development instincts of a business development leader: someone who can create an opportunity where one does not yet exist, develop the ecosystem required to win it, and work alongside a deeply technical Solutions Architect to turn that opportunity into a deployed capability.

Base Salary:
$145,000 – $185,000 base salary.

This role is eligible to participate in Defense Unicorn's commission plan and it is common for employees in this role to receive total on-target earnings of $290k to $370k.

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

• Cloud Environments (AWS/GCP and Azure)
• Continuous Delivery and automation tooling
• GitOps
• Containers
• CNCF projects and open source products and packages
• Building and improving security delivery
• Building Kubernetes and cloud native applications

Benefits Our Unicorns Enjoy

Health:

• Premiums are 100% Company Paid
• Health Savings Account
• Life Insurance
• Disability Insurance
• 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

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 meet 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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