U.S. Defense Sales Director

Location: Remote within the USA; Bay Area or Washington D.C. Travel up to 25% is required.

Salary: $150K–$185K, plus equity and $150K–$185K commission.

Company

hirify.global designs, builds, and deploys a privately owned network of marine sensors that combines oceanographic and underwater acoustic sensing for marine weather forecasting, maritime domain awareness, route optimization, and mission-critical decision support.

What you will do

• Own U.S. Defense revenue growth, including sales targets, pipeline development, strategic deal closure, and team enablement.
• Identify, shape, capture, and win complex opportunities across U.S. defense agencies, military branches, program offices, contracting organizations, and prime contractors.
• Build customer relationships and convert early interest into funded federal programs involving maritime domain awareness, undersea warfare, decision support, autonomy, route optimization, and ocean intelligence.
• Coach and support the existing defense sales team while directly managing customer engagements, proposals, partner strategies, and deal execution.
• Develop teaming strategies with prime contractors and technology partners and collaborate with product, engineering, legal, finance, marketing, operations, and leadership.
• Provide leadership with assessments of pipeline health, capture progress, risks, resource needs, and recommended actions.

Requirements

• 10+ years of U.S. defense technology sales experience, including complex federal opportunities involving multiple stakeholders and demonstrated sales-team leadership.
• U.S. citizenship and a current or previous Secret-or-higher U.S. government security clearance.
• Established network across the U.S. Defense, Intelligence, and Security ecosystem, including service branches, acquisition organizations, program offices, systems integrators, prime contractors, and other government and industry partners.
• Ability to connect operational users, program managers, contracting officials, funders, policymakers, and industry partners around a path to award.
• Working knowledge of federal budget, authorization, and appropriations processes and their relationship to sales-pipeline management.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including translating technical capabilities and customer needs into audience-appropriate narratives.
• Ability and willingness to work directly on partner strategies, presentations, customer follow-up, proposals, and deal execution.
• Ability to understand sophisticated hardware, software, and data products and translate them into value propositions for defense customers.
• Willingness to travel up to 25% to meet customers, policymakers, partners, and other stakeholders.

Nice to have

• Active SECRET or TS/SCI security clearance.
• Direct experience with maritime, ocean, weather, environmental, autonomy, sensing, data, or decision-support programs.
• Experience at a fast-paced defense technology company or with the U.S. Navy, Air Force, Army, SOCOM, U.S. Intelligence Community, or other agencies with maritime or national-security missions.
• Experience selling or preparing federal-government proposals for hardware-enabled solutions, data-as-a-service offerings, software, or integrated technical capabilities.

Culture & Benefits

• Mission focused on ocean science, climate, maritime safety, environmental intelligence, and national security.
• AI tools are used for day-to-day work and may support application refinement, interview preparation, and candidate communications.
• Applicants are encouraged to apply even without every listed qualification.
• Visa sponsorship is available when feasible, supported by an immigration lawyer.
• Equity is included in the compensation package.

Hiring process

• Applicants should write their own initial application draft; AI may be used for refinement and polishing, not for generating personal experience.
• Take-home assessments must be completed independently unless AI use is explicitly permitted.
• Interviews are conducted as live conversations, with AI permitted for preparation.