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Salary: USD 148,750 - 201,250 / annual
Defense Unicorns is seeking a Senior Solutions Architect to join their team and serve as a trusted technical advisor for customers and their engineering teams. This role combines technical leadership with customer-facing delivery, focusing on the Unicorn Delivery Service (UDS) platform and related capabilities.
You will act as the primary point of contact for customers, understanding their technical needs, challenges, and goals while providing strategic guidance and support. A key responsibility is leading and mentoring a team of engineers, fostering continuous learning and growth while supporting customer engagements. You will work closely with technical groups to drive mission impact, providing expertise, proactive assistance, and strategic insights.
Key responsibilities include:
- Serving as trusted advisor for customers and their technical needs
- Leading, mentoring, and developing engineering teams
- Understanding and articulating the technical competency and impact of team members
- Assisting with discovery and framing efforts across the industry
- Identifying and implementing process improvements for team efficiency
- Managing proof-of-concept work and customer demonstrations
- Building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines
- Building, deploying, testing, and troubleshooting UDS Bundles, Zarf packages, and UDS packages
- Collaborating cross-functionally on brainstorming, research, and growth strategies
- Conducting market research and competitor analysis
- Staying current with industry trends, best practices, and emerging technologies
- Experimenting with new tools and techniques to improve outcomes
Defense Unicorns delivers mission value by streamlining software delivery for defense and civil agencies. The company specializes in secure, cloud-native solutions for continuous software integration and delivery, working with Kubernetes, cloud environments (AWS/GCP/Azure), infrastructure-as-code, GitOps, containers, and CNCF projects.
This position requires U.S. citizenship and a Secret security clearance. Travel is approximately 25%.
REQUIREMENTS:
- U.S. citizenship (required)
- 7+ years of software engineering experience with 1+ years in a manager role
- Proven track record of leading and developing high-performing engineering teams
- Extensive knowledge of containerization and container orchestration, specifically Kubernetes
- 4+ years of experience with full-stack development teams
- 5+ years of experience with defense-based customer-facing interactions and engagements
- Excellent communication and interpersonal skills with ability to collaborate, persuade, and negotiate
- Strong analytical skills and ability to interpret complex data
- Proficiency in programming languages (e.g., Python, JavaScript) and familiarity with web technologies
- Experience with Kubernetes, Helm, and containers
- Knowledge of system architecture (both cloud and on-prem)
- Ability to architect solutions based on customer requirements and articulate those solutions
- Understanding of continuous delivery and agile principles
- Experience with training and mentoring
- Preferred: knowledge of CNCF ecosystem and tooling; experience in growth engineering or digital marketing within tech startups; full-stack development experience; proven experience synthesizing technical solutions
