---
title: 'Senior Solutions Architect at Defense Unicorns'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-solutions-architect-defense-unicorns-united-states-trxavrqsjjsy'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-17'
---

# Senior Solutions Architect at Defense Unicorns

- **Company:** Defense Unicorns
- **Location:** United States
- **Compensation:** $149k–$201k
- **Work type:** remote
- **Posted:** 2026-10-15
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-17
- **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/defenseunicorns/jobs/5265944007

## Job description

EMPLOYER IS A CONTRACTOR FOR THE U.S. GOVERNMENT. THIS POSITION REQUIRES U.S. CITIZENSHIP.

Role Description:

We are seeking a talented and motivated Solutions Architect to join our dynamic team. As a Solutions Architect, you will be responsible for delivering exceptional guidance, support, and enablement focused on our Unicorn Delivery Service projects and capabilities. You will work closely with technical groups driving towards mission impact, providing technical expertise, proactive assistance, and strategic insights to maximize mission impact. This role is instrumental in ensuring a seamless and successful customer experience throughout the initial engagement and transition to longer-term execution.

## Responsibilities

- Act as the primary point of contact and trusted advisor for customers and their technical needs, challenges, and goals.
- Lead, mentor, and develop a team of engineers, fostering a culture of continuous learning, growth, and support of customer engagements.
- Understand and articulate the technical competency and impact of engineers on the team.
- Understand Defense Unicorns' products and philosophy.
- Assist the team in discovery and framing efforts across the industry.
- Identify and implement process improvements to increase team efficiency and effectiveness.
- Assist with demonstration and content creation on products.
- Manage the "proof of concept" work.
- Build and maintain continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines.
- Build, deploy, test, and troubleshoot UDS Bundles, Zarf packages, and UDS packages.
- Collaborate with cross-functional teams for brainstorming, research, and innovative growth strategies.
- Conduct market research and competitor analysis to identify growth opportunities.
- Stay up-to-date with industry trends, best practices, and emerging technologies related to growth hacking and user acquisition.
- Experiment with new tools, techniques, and technologies to improve growth outcomes.

The listed responsibilities are not exhaustive and additional responsibilities may be assigned based on the evolving needs of the organization. We are seeking a dynamic individual who is able to adapt and take on new responsibilities as they arise.

Clearance & Travel

- Citizenship: U.S. citizenship required.
- Travel: 25%.
- Security Clearance: Secret

## Preferred Experience and Qualifications

- Proven experience in growth engineering, digital marketing, or related roles within a tech startup environment.
- Extensive knowledge in containerization and container orchestration, specifically Kubernetes.
- Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to effectively collaborate, persuade and negotiate.
- 7+ years of experience in software engineering, with 1+ years in a manager role.
- Proven track record of leading and developing high-performing engineering teams.
- Preferred knowledge in the CNCF ecosystem and tooling.
- Knowledge in system architecture both cloud and on-prem.
- Ability to architect solutions based on potential customer requirements and articulate those solutions.
- Strong analytical skills and the ability to interpret complex data for informed decision-making.
- Proficiency in programming languages (e.g., Python, JavaScript) and familiarity with web technologies.
- Self-motivated, proactive, and able to work independently with minimal supervision.
- Experience with training and mentoring.
- Experience with full-stack development.
- Understanding of continuous delivery and agile principles.
- 4+ years of experience with full-stack development teams.
- 5+ years of experience with Defense-based customer-facing interactions and engagements.
- Proven experience synthesizing technical solutions and making sense of them.
- Experience with Kubernetes, Helm, and Containers.

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 $148,750—$201,250 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](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DzT00w2uadYw9TfdorHuEsvPccZvn_g4/view?usp=drive_link)

## About Defense Unicorns

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Defense Unicorns delivers secure, scalable, and vendor-lock-free software deployment solutions for mission-critical, air-gapped, and classified environments, primarily for the U.S. Department of Defense and intelligence community.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series B)
- **Headquarters**: Colorado, United States
- **Founded**: 2021
- **Founders**: Rob Slaughter (CEO), Jeff McCoy (CTO), Andrew Greene (Co-founder)

## Core Business
- Primary industry/industries: Defense technology, software development, national security, cloud-native infrastructure
- Target customers: U.S. Department of Defense agencies, system integrators, and mission teams operating in air-gapped, classified, or highly secure environments
- Mission or purpose statement: "Advance freedom globally by transforming how the U.S. defense and intelligence community buys, builds, delivers, and sustains mission capabilities."

## Products & Services
- **[UDS (Unicorn Delivery Service)]**: An open-source, platform-agnostic software delivery platform that enables the packaging, deployment, and management of modern cloud-native applications into air-gapped, edge, and classified environments. It automates security compliance, vulnerability scanning, and continuous ATO (cATO) workflows.
- **[Zarf]**: An open-source, air-gap-native software delivery tool that was the company’s first product, designed to simplify deploying containerized applications in disconnected environments.
- **Professional Services & Mission Support**: Custom engineering, platform integration, and mission-specific deployment support for DoD agencies and system integrators.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: $1 Billion+ (achieved unicorn status in January 2026)
- **Key Metric**: Total Funding of $171.5M across two rounds
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Bain Capital (led Series B of $136M in January 2026), Ansa Capital and Sapphire Ventures (co-led $35M Series A in February 2024)
- **Growth Signals**: Headcount of 150+ employees (35.9% YoY growth), 35,000+ LinkedIn followers (42.4% yearly growth), 34 active job postings, and a growing list of DoD and intelligence community clients.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Deep domain expertise**: Founded by veterans of Kessel Run and Platform One, the team has firsthand experience building and deploying software within the DoD, giving them unique credibility and insight.
- **Open-source, vendor-lock-free philosophy**: Their products (UDS, Zarf) are open-source, ensuring no proprietary vendor lock-in, which is a critical requirement for national security systems.
- **Air-gap specialization**: Their core technology is purpose-built for the most challenging deployment environments (disconnected, classified, edge), a niche that few commercial software companies can serve.
- **Continuous ATO integration**: Security and compliance are built directly into the software delivery pipeline, dramatically reducing the time to get new capabilities into the hands of warfighters.

## Strategic Focus
- **Scaling the platform**: With the $136M Series B, the company is aggressively investing in product development, engineering, and go-to-market teams to expand UDS capabilities and customer reach.
- **Expanding mission delivery**: Hiring across multiple "Mission Manager" and "Account Executive" roles focused on specific military branches (Air Force, Army, Navy, Space, USSOCOM), indicating deep vertical integration into each service branch.
- **Open-source ecosystem growth**: Continuing to build and nurture the open-source community around UDS and Zarf to drive adoption and create partnership opportunities across the defense software ecosystem.

## Why Work Here
- **Mission-driven culture**: The company operates with a single belief: "a value not lived is not a value at all." Core values include "We Take Extreme Ownership," "We Innovate to Impact," and "We Are MISSION Driven."
- **Remote-first environment**: Most roles are fully remote from anywhere in the United States, with support for home office setup. Onsite requirements are clearly noted when needed for mission support.
- **Comprehensive benefits**: 100% employer-paid medical, dental, and vision insurance for employees (shared cost for dependents), company equity options, 401k, life and disability insurance, and generous paid parental leave.
- **Generous time off**: Flexible Time Off (FTO) plus all Federal Holidays, one week for Thanksgiving, and two weeks for Christmas and New Year’s.
- **Career growth**: Financial support for training, conferences, and professional subscriptions.
- **SkillBridge program**: Authorized DoD SkillBridge provider, offering internships and apprenticeships for service members transitioning to civilian careers.
- **Engineering-driven**: "Engineer Driven" is a core identity, with a strong emphasis on solving hard technical problems for national security.

## Sources
1. [defenseunicorns.com - About Us](https://defenseunicorns.com/company/)
2. [defenseunicorns.com - The Airgap Software Company](https://defenseunicorns.com/)
3. [defenseunicorns.com - Careers](https://defenseunicorns.com/careers/)
4. [Greenhouse - Jobs at Defense Unicorns](http://job-boards.greenhouse.io/defenseunicorns)
5. [LinkedIn - Defense Unicorns](https://www.linkedin.com/company/defense-unicorns)

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