Senior Director, Mission AI

Everfox

$317K — $423K *
Aerospace & Defense
8 - 10 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 10+ years in business development within AI, cloud, cybersecurity, or defense tech.
  • Proven track record in building new business ecosystems.
  • Experience generating significant pipeline for large opportunities (7-8 figures).
  • Strong grasp of modern AI architectures and agentic AI models.
  • Familiarity with the Department of War and Intelligence Community dynamics.
  • Ability to translate technical concepts into actionable mission outcomes.
  • Excellent executive communication skills, capable of independent operation.

Responsibilities

  • Develop and implement the Mission AI business strategy and plans.
  • Identify priority markets, mission use cases, and bookings objectives.
  • Build and oversee a national-security AI ecosystem.
  • Align strategies with sales, engineering, and marketing teams.
  • Offer market intelligence insights to executive leadership.
  • Forge strategic partnerships with leading AI model providers.
  • Drive business development and opportunity creation throughout various defense sectors.

Benefits

  • Flexible paid time off (PTO) policy.
  • 401k matching program.
  • Contribution to healthcare coverage.
Full Job Description

We’re hiring for a hybrid role. You’ll work on-site with your team several days each week (typically 2–3), with the specific days set by your manager. Because regular in-person collaboration is central to this job, we look for candidates who live within about 50 miles of the office.

Mission AI Business Unit Leader (Senior Director / Director)

Strategic Growth Organization (SGO)
Reports to: Senior Vice President, Strategic Growth Organization

Position Summary

The Mission AI Business Unit Leader is responsible for building, leading, and scaling Everfox’s Mission AI business, serving simultaneously as both the strategic business unit leader and the primary business development executive until the organization reaches sufficient scale. This role focuses on business creation, revenue generation, ecosystem development, and strategic AI partnerships across U.S. national-security markets including the Department of War, Intelligence Community, Five Eyes, NATO, and allied governments.

The leader will define strategy, recruit partners, generate pipeline, orchestrate cross-functional collaboration, and position Everfox as the secure information-exchange layer bridging mission data with frontier AI models, accelerated compute, agents, mission applications, and operational environments.

Responsibilities

Business Unit Leadership

  • Develop and execute Mission AI business strategy, including annual and multi-year plans.
  • Define priority markets, mission use cases, and pipeline/bookings objectives.
  • Build and manage a national-security AI ecosystem spanning compute, cloud, models, data platforms, agents, and mission applications.
  • Coordinate strategy with sales, engineering, product, marketing, and executive leadership.
  • Provide strategic market intelligence to executive leadership.

AI Ecosystem Development

  • Establish strategic relationships with frontier/foundation model providers such as OpenAI, xAI, Google DeepMind, Microsoft, Oracle, and emerging government-authorized model companies.
  • Lead partnerships across NVIDIA’s accelerated-compute, AI Factory, and edge-AI ecosystems.
  • Work jointly with the Hyperscaler Business Unit to develop cloud-integrated AI solutions across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle, and emerging AI clouds.

Mission-Centric AI Strategy

  • Recruit partners that support mission-data ingestion, normalization, analytics, workflows, and decision intelligence.
  • Develop explicit strategies for agentic AI platforms capable of search, analysis, correlation, workflow automation, logistics support, cyber defense, and mission-system interaction.
  • Build an AI application ecosystem across intelligence, C2, cybersecurity, autonomy, logistics, space, coalition operations, and tactical edge environments.

Opportunity Creation & Pipeline Growth

  • Serve as the primary business development executive generating opportunities, pipeline, and strategic pursuits.
  • Develop customer relationships across DoW CDAO, military services, Intelligence Community, program offices, laboratories, DISA, Five Eyes partners, NATO, and allied nations.
  • Drive commercial success measured through qualified pipeline, influenced bookings, recurring revenue, AI Factory deployments, and partner-sourced pipeline.

Solution Development & GTM Execution

  • Create repeatable Mission AI solutions, including DoW AI Arsenal use cases and AI Factory architectures.
  • Define mission problems, data sources, security domains, models, agents, applications, human decision points, commercial models, and partner roles.
  • Combine all four Strategic Growth Organization business units to deliver integrated architectures spanning sensors, data, cloud, models, agents, mission applications, and operational outputs.

Required Experience

  • 10+ years of experience in business development, AI, cloud, cybersecurity, defense technology, or related fields.
  • Proven experience building new businesses, markets, or complex ecosystems.
  • Demonstrated personal pipeline-generation capability, including seven- and eight-figure opportunities.
  • Strong understanding of modern AI architectures, frontier models, generative AI, and agentic AI.
  • Deep familiarity with Department of War and Intelligence Community markets.
  • Ability to translate technical capabilities into mission outcomes and engage with both major technology companies and startups.
  • Strong executive communication skills; ability to operate independently with limited initial resources.

Active security clearance preferred; TS/SCI strongly desirable.


A reasonable estimate of the on-target earnings ("OTE") for this role is between:

$317,200.00-423,100.00 USD

The actual OTE offered may vary within the range based on a candidates' unique experience, locale, and business needs. In addition to the OTE, Everfox offers a generous benefits package including flexible PTO, a 401k match, and contribution to healthcare coverages. Our Talent Acquisition team will provide specific information regarding OTE and benefits offerings.


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Don’t meet every single qualification? Studies show people are hesitant to apply if they don’t meet all requirements listed in a job posting. If there is something slightly different about your previous experience, but it otherwise aligns and you’re excited about this role, we encourage you to apply. You could be a great candidate for this or other roles on our team.

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