Founding Business Development Lead

Equity: 0.3% – 1% depending on experience

About Us

We're a stealth team building space hardware at the edge of what's currently possible — high-stakes, flight-grade systems where the engineering bar is unforgiving and the upside is enormous. While we can't share full details yet, our founding and early engineering team includes talent from SpaceX, Northrop Grumman, and Impulse Space, the group includes people who've pulled off feats almost no one else on Earth has.

Role Overview

We are seeking a Business Development Lead to build our customer base from first principles — finding the missions that need what we're building, winning the contracts and partnerships that fund it, and making sure the market shapes what we build next.

This is a senior leadership role. You will not only define and execute our go-to-market strategy across commercial and U.S. Government customers, but also help build the business development team, set standards, mentor team members, and establish the systems, processes, and culture required to win in both markets.

This is not a narrow sales role. You will own the full pipeline: market and customer discovery, relationships with operators, primes, and government program offices, capture strategy, proposals and pricing, contract negotiation, and the partnerships that open new markets. You will partner closely with the founders and engineering leads to turn customer needs into requirements and roadmap, and make tradeoffs across opportunity size, technical fit, timeline, margin, risk, and strategic value.

The ideal candidate has direct experience selling space systems or services to both commercial customers and the U.S. Government, deep relationships across the space ecosystem, and team leadership experience. We recognize that very few people have all of this. What matters most is that you have exceptional judgment, have closed meaningful deals in complex technical markets, have managed or mentored people in high-performance environments, and can operate independently in ambiguity while making sound business tradeoffs. You will have direct ownership over one of the company's core challenges.

Key Responsibilities

Own go-to-market strategy across commercial and U.S. Government markets, from market sizing and positioning through pipeline, capture, award, and customer success.

Identify and qualify opportunities across defense, intelligence, civil, and commercial space, and build a pipeline that balances near-term revenue with long-term strategic position.

Build relationships with U.S. Government stakeholders — program offices, requirements owners, innovation organizations, and contracting officers — across organizations such as the U.S. Space Force, Space Development Agency, NRO, AFRL, DIU, DARPA, Missile Defense Agency, and NASA.

Build relationships with commercial customers and partners: satellite operators, constellation builders, prime contractors, launch providers, and hosted payload and in-space services companies.

Lead capture for government opportunities: shaping requirements before solicitations, competitive analysis, teaming strategy, win themes, and bid/no-bid decisions.

Pursue both non-traditional and traditional vehicles: SBIR/STTR, Other Transaction Agreements, Commercial Solutions Openings, BAAs, IDIQs, and FAR-based contracts, including strategic funding programs (e.g., SpaceWERX STRATFI/TACFI).

Lead proposal development: own the process, write and edit compelling technical and business volumes, coordinate engineering inputs, and run color team reviews.

Own pricing and deal structure with finance and engineering: cost volumes, price-to-win, commercial pricing models, and terms that protect margin and schedule.

Lead negotiations with legal: commercial MSAs, SOWs, NDAs, teaming agreements, and government contract terms, including IP and data rights.

Run commercial sales cycles end to end: discovery, technical solutioning with engineering, proposals, negotiation, and close.

Develop strategic partnerships with primes, suppliers, launch providers, and other space companies that expand our reach or capabilities.