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Salary: USD 148,750 - 201,250 / annual
Defense Unicorns is seeking a Hackathons Team Lead to serve as the technical backbone of their hackathon program. In this role, you will set the architecture, integration patterns, and technical guardrails for large-scale, community-facing hackathon events throughout the year. You'll work fluidly between technical strategy and stakeholder engagement, energizing mission-focused builders and operators.
You will own the overall technical direction for each hackathon, ensuring solutions align with UDS (Unified Defense Stack) and Defense Unicorns' platform philosophy. You'll evaluate and integrate partner technologies and third-party tools to ensure broad compatibility across diverse technology stacks that participants bring. You'll define technical guardrails, reference architectures, and integration patterns that guide participant teams toward durable, deployable outcomes, and identify technical risks early with mitigation strategies.
As a credible technical voice, you'll engage directly with government mission stakeholders, industry partners, and hackathon participants. You'll translate complex technical capabilities into compelling narratives that communicate mission impact and drive stakeholder buy-in. You'll build enthusiasm and credibility across audiences ranging from senior government decision-makers to individual contributors on participant teams.
You'll partner closely with the team throughout the full event lifecycle—from planning through post-event follow-up. You'll design and deliver technical programming, workshops, and participant enablement content. You'll capture technical outcomes and ensure post-event documentation supports continuity and reuse.
Required: Strong hands-on technical background designing and building software systems in complex, multi-technology environments. Hands-on experience with UDS or similar platform abstraction and deployment frameworks. Experience engaging directly with government or defense stakeholders in a technical capacity, translating technical concepts for non-technical audiences. Comfort with presales or customer-facing roles blending technical credibility with ability to generate excitement. Demonstrated understanding of software delivery and platform engineering practices for air-gapped environments, including offline package management, artifact distribution, and secure update mechanisms.
Preferred: Familiarity with the DoD innovation ecosystem, programs, procurement, and mission priorities. Experience supporting or participating in hackathons, integration events, or innovation sprints in a technical leadership capacity. Ability to operate in ambiguous, fast-moving environments and build structure where none exists. Track record of delivering technical solutions that outlast the event that created them.
Travel is expected multiple times per year to support event execution and stakeholder engagement, primarily within the continental United States, occasionally OCONUS.
