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Salary: USD 185,000 - 230,000 / annual
Vannevar Labs builds AI systems for the U.S. Department of Defense's most critical missions, with 125+ deployments across every military branch and combatant command. The company deploys engineers, product teams, and leadership directly to operational units to solve real-world problems in great power competition, combat operations, and counter-narcotics missions.
You will join a small, high-impact team as Senior Business Operations Manager, owning the company's most important operational and strategic challenges. This is a high-ownership role with significant scope and growth potential.
In your first six months, you will focus on two main priorities: (1) Partner with mission and engineering leaders to build systems for managing customer delivery against nine-figure deal volumes and fill capability gaps needed to execute customer and product priorities. (2) Build core business and operational systems and lightweight processes to enable scaling.
After the initial phase, you will help source, attract, and onboard specialized and senior talent for growth areas, and work deeply within a select customer/mission area to shape the business and operating model for one of the company's fastest-growing segments.
Key responsibilities include:
**Customer Delivery & Commercial Operations** — Vannevar has scaled to win deployments with every U.S. Military Service, Combatant Command, international customers, and other federal agencies. You will build practical systems to ensure seamless and efficient delivery against customer obligations and service objectives. You'll partner with finance and engineering to understand cost structure, identify improvement opportunities, and reduce friction to enhance end-user experience and business performance.
**Operational Systems for the Business** — With rapid growth planned for 2027, you will build and tailor tools, processes, and AI agents to solve prioritized business problems spanning finance, customer delivery, recruiting, onboarding, HR, vendor/contract management, and other areas. You'll design systems that other functions can operate indefinitely or run autonomously, freeing you to tackle the next set of challenges.
**Strategy for Senior & Specialized Talent** — Some of Vannevar's most important roles for the next growth phase are new hires the company hasn't made before. You will help prioritize roles aligned with ambitious customer, mission, and product goals, and work closely with senior leadership to develop tailored plans to identify, attract, and hire exceptional people.
**Business & Operating Model for Growth Areas** — Once you understand company priorities, you'll go deep on a single high-growth customer/mission area. You'll work with those teams to understand the growth opportunity and think creatively about business and delivery models to unlock the next phase. You'll build deep understanding of mission problems and how customers leverage the company's tools, combined with business and operational judgment.
**Special Projects** — Important problems regularly surface in a fast-growing company with a deliberately lean internal team. You may analyze major strategic investments, design infrastructure for tracking strategic goals, or identify and rebuild broken key processes.
You will have extensive opportunity to work with executives and leaders across the company, with growth trajectories to lead Business Operations at Vannevar or move laterally to lead another function or line of business.
**Requirements:**
- 5–10+ years of relevant work experience
- Background in national security, management consulting, or high-growth startups preferred; evidence of executing and building new things required
- Comfort with recruiting and building strong teams
- Experience scaling commercial and business operations
- Experience supporting new business growth
- Ownership and autonomy mindset: you care about whether things work, not just whether processes were followed; you take responsibility for outcomes and don't wait to be told what to do next
- Strong judgment: you figure out the right problem to work on, not just the one handed to you; comfortable operating with ambiguity; able to decide when to build lightweight and fast versus when to invest more
- Speed and efficiency: you move quickly and build processes and tools that allow others to move quickly; you eliminate time taxes and unnecessary costs
- Plus: comfortable designing AI agents for ongoing business processes; strong cross-functional project execution; ability to quickly build credibility with senior leaders
