Director Of Technical Operations

Director Of Technical Operations 

The Basics

• Location: Washington, D.C. 
• Type: Full-time employee
• Reports to: Founder & Chief Executive Officer
• Compensation: $180,000-$220,000 base plus meaningful equity
• Eligibility: U.S. citizenship required
• Clearance: Active Secret required, Top Secret preferred
• Travel: Periodic in-person time, roughly a week a month

The Company

A venture-backed AI software company whose platform designs spacecraft hardware. It generates antenna, power, and propulsion designs in days, work that normally takes engineering teams months.

The models are the company's own, built over years of applied machine learning research rather than layered on top of a large language model. A natural-language interface now sits over the platform.

Customers include a top-tier international aerospace manufacturer flying high-profile missions and a U.S. satellite constellation manufacturer led by veterans of a major commercial space program. The company also collaborates with a federally funded national research laboratory.

Funding is seed-stage, raised largely from U.S. defense investors. The team is under 20 people: most are engineers and physicists based overseas, several holding doctorates, with a small business and strategy group in the U.S. Headquarters is in Los Angeles. It is a software company that happens to have started in spacecraft. Near-term programs are satellite hardware, and the intent is to take the same models into other domains.

The Role

This seat sits between the platform and the customer.

The company sells design software to aerospace primes, satellite manufacturers, and defense programs. Those conversations do not survive a purely commercial owner. You have to be credible enough to defend the physics and the modeling in a technical review, then explain the same thing to a program manager who controls the budget.

You are not being hired to ship production software. The engineering team does that. You are being hired to be genuinely hands-on with the models: scripting, analysis, benchmarking, and validation, deep enough to diagnose a bad result yourself and hold your ground when a customer's engineers push back.

You will report directly to the founder and CEO, who holds a doctorate in physics and wrote the original algorithms behind the platform. As the U.S. entity's security and compliance infrastructure matures, the seat moves under the CTO.

The company expects this role's scope to expand materially inside roughly the first six months as the U.S. leadership team gets built out. That is the pattern it has followed with every important hire so far.

What You'll Own

• Customer delivery. Technical ownership of named accounts, from first evaluation through deployment of the platform inside their design workflows.
• The room. Scoping problems with customer engineering teams, running evaluations, demonstrating the platform, and diagnosing what went wrong when a design does not converge.
• Hands-on work. Scripting, analysis, benchmarking, and validation against the models, rather than routing every question to engineering.
• The requirements loop. Translating what customers actually need into something engineering can build against, and pushing back when a request does not generalize.
• Restricted access. Representing the company in closed-door sessions and program reviews that require U.S. persons.
• Pre-sales credibility. Proposals, technical responses, and benchmark studies: the technical half of the sales conversation.
• The template. Setting the pattern for the U.S. technical team, since you are the first hire into it, and taking on more of it as the company grows.

You'll Thrive Here If You

• Are comfortable being the most technical person in a customer meeting and the most customer-facing person in an engineering review.
• Can explain a hard concept to a non-specialist without hollowing it out.
• Are curious well past your own specialty. The people who do best here came in as engineers or physicists and taught themselves the software and machine learning side because they wanted to.
• Want ownership of a domain rather than a defined scope, and are not waiting for a title to justify acting.
• Would rather join a company of under 20 people before the org chart is written than a 500-person one after.

Required

• U.S. citizenship.
• Active U.S. security clearance at the Secret level or above. The company is not sponsoring new clearances at this stage.
• Military or defense background. Any branch, any service component.
• Bachelor's degree in engineering, any discipline, or in a hard science such as physics.
• Hands-on depth in applied machine learning, numerical optimization, or physics-based modeling and simulation. It does not have to have been in aerospace.
• A track record of client-facing technical work: solutions, applications, forward-deployed or field engineering, mission management, or technical program management.
• Based in or near Los Angeles or Washington, D.C.

Preferred

• Active Top Secret clearance. Clearance at that level materially changes what can be shared across the company's U.S. and international teams.
• Experience at a successful aerospace, space, or deep-tech startup, particularly as one of the first 50 people.
• Working familiarity with spacecraft subsystems: propulsion, power, structures, or RF.
• Master's or doctorate in engineering, physics, or a related field.

Explicitly Not Required

• Writing production software. You need to be credible enough to defend the platform under technical challenge, not to ship it.
• An advanced degree. Several of the team hold one and it reads as a positive signal, but it is not a requirement.
• Relocation. The company is deliberately concentrating its U.S. team rather than going fully distributed, but no one is being asked to move as a condition of being hired.

Compensation and Location

Approximately $200,000 base salary plus meaningful equity, with real flexibility above that band for an exceptional candidate. The option pool was deliberately topped up at the last round, so grants at this level are substantive rather than nominal.

Headquarters is Los Angeles, with Washington, D.C. a live second hub given how much of the company's work now pulls there. The company is building toward a concentrated U.S. team rather than a distributed one. Expect periodic in-person time, on the order of a week a month. Where the center of gravity ultimately sits will follow where the team concentrates.