Role Mission

Own, lead, and scale Discovery & Framing at Defense Unicorns—help customers identify and clearly define the mission problems that matter, quantify their impact, establish what success looks like, and create the clarity needed to determine the right path forward.

The Head of Discovery & Framing will lead the highest-priority customer engagements, establish the D&F methodology and quality standard, and build the team required to deliver the discipline at scale.

The Role

Defense Unicorns is creating a dedicated Discovery & Framing function to improve how we understand customer problems before moving into solution design.

This is a senior, hands-on strategy role for someone who knows how to walk into an ambiguous customer situation, ask the questions others miss, separate symptoms from root causes, and turn a complex discussion into a clear and measurable mission problem.

Trust is built by knowing the customer's mission intimately—its language, operating tempo, constraints, failure modes, stakeholder pressures, and consequences of getting it wrong.

The Head of D&F must be equally comfortable facilitating a working session with senior customer leaders, interviewing operators and technical stakeholders, analyzing what was learned, and producing a concise executive-quality output afterward.

This is not a traditional sales role, product presentation role, or technical discovery role.

What You Will Own

• Lead Discovery & Framing Engagements
• Build the Discovery & Framing Function
• Start With a Hypothesis
• Discover the Real Problem
• Frame the Problem
• Make the Impact Measurable
• Define Success
• Map the Decision System
• Expose the Path to Action
• Own the Customer-Facing Output
• Maintain Independence of Judgment

The D&F Engagement

A strong D&F engagement follows five stages:

1. Prepare
2. Discover
3. Frame
4. Validate
5. Mobilize

How You Will Work

Account Executive / Mission Seller: Owns the customer relationship, account and opportunity strategy, commercial process, and follow-through on agreed actions.

Head of Discovery & Framing: Owns the D&F methodology, engagement preparation, facilitation, synthesis, customer-facing outputs, quality standards, team development, and capacity.

Discovery & Framing Strategist: Supports and leads D&F engagements under the methodology and standards established by the Head of D&F. Conducts research, facilitates assigned engagements, analyzes findings, produces customer outputs, and maintains internal records.

Solutions Engineer / Technical Lead: Owns technical discovery, architecture, feasibility, solution design, and technical validation once the mission problem and desired outcomes are sufficiently understood.

Sales Leadership and Enablement: Reinforce adoption, qualification discipline, coaching, and follow-through.

What You Bring

• Client-Facing Strategy Depth
• Executive Facilitation
• Structured Problem Solving
• Mission Intimacy and Translation
• Crisp Executive Communication
• Team-Building Leadership

How Success Will Be Measured

• Better discovery
• Measurable problems
• Better qualification
• Strong customer outputs
• Opportunity movement
• Fewer late surprises
• A scalable D&F capability

What This Role Is

• Functional leader of Discovery & Framing
• Senior customer strategist
• Executive facilitator
• Structured problem solver
• Builder of the D&F methodology
• Builder and leader of the D&F team
• Independent tester of customer problem and fit
• Bridge between mission problem and capability need

What This Role Is Not

• A quota-carrying Account Executive
• A general sales enablement role
• A product marketer
• A Solutions Engineer
• A technical architecture role
• A one-time workshop facilitator
• A presentation resource
• A disguised product pitch

Operating Principle

Understand the mission. Discover the real problem. Frame it in measurable terms. Validate it with the customer. Then determine what should happen next.

Compensation

Full compensation packages are based on candidate experience. Compensation ranges are established using national benchmarking data and apply across all geographic locations within the United States.

Remote - USA

$204,000—$276,000 USD

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

• Kubernetes
• Cloud Environments (AWS/GCP and Azure)
• Infrastructure-as-code (like Terraform/Pulumi)
• Continuous Delivery and automation tooling
• GitOps
• Containers
• CNCF projects and open source products and packages
• Helm/Kustomize-Value Stream Mapping
• Building and improving security delivery
• Building Kubernetes and cloud native applications

Benefits Our Unicorns Enjoy

Health:

• Medical/Dental/Vision
• Premiums are 100% Company Paid
• Health Savings Account
• Life Insurance
• Disability Insurance

Financial:

• 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

Paid Parental Leave

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.

CCPA DISCLOSURE