Hackathons - Team Lead

Role Description

As a Team Lead at Defense Unicorns, you will serve as the technical backbone of our hackathon program: setting the architecture, integration patterns, and technical guardrails every event runs on. You'll work across the team to design, plan, and execute large-scale, community-facing hackathon events throughout the year, moving fluidly between technical strategy and energizing a room full of mission heroes, operators, and builders.

You'll evaluate and integrate the right mix of partner technologies into a durable reference architecture that works within controlled environments. You'll serve as a credible technical voice with government stakeholders and industry partners, ensuring every hackathon is built on a foundation that sets participants up to succeed and produces outcomes that can transition to production.

Responsibilities

• Technical Direction and Architecture
  • Set and own the overall technical direction for each hackathon, ensuring solutions are grounded in UDS and Defense Unicorns' platform and tooling philosophy.
  • Evaluate and integrate partner technologies and third-party tools to ensure broad compatibility across the diverse technology stacks participants bring.
  • Define technical guardrails, reference architectures, and integration patterns that guide participant teams toward durable, deployable outcomes.
  • Identify technical risks early and develop mitigation strategies in partnership with the Mission Manager.
• Stakeholder Engagement
  • Serve as a technical voice in external engagements with government mission heroes, industry partners, and hackathon participants.
  • Translate complex technical capabilities into compelling narratives that communicate mission impact and drive stakeholder buy-in.
  • Build enthusiasm and credibility with a wide range of audiences, from senior government decision-makers to individual contributors on participant teams.
  • Support the Mission Manager in cultivating and sustaining relationships across the DoW innovation ecosystem.
• Hackathon Execution
  • Partner closely with our team, our partners, and the Mission Heroes throughout the full event lifecycle, from planning through post-event follow-up.
  • Design and deliver technical programming, workshops, and participant enablement content that set teams up for success.
  • Capture technical outcomes and ensure post-event documentation supports continuity and reuse.

Qualifications

• Strong hands-on technical background, with demonstrated experience designing and building software systems in complex, multi-technology environments.
• Hands-on experience with UDS or similar platform abstraction and deployment frameworks.
• Experience engaging directly with government or defense stakeholders in a technical capacity, including translating technical concepts for non-technical audiences.
• Comfort with presales or customer-facing roles that blend technical credibility with the ability to generate excitement and communicate value.
• Demonstrated understanding of software delivery and platform engineering practices for air-gapped environments, including offline package management, artifact distribution, and secure update mechanisms.

Preferred Qualifications

• Familiarity with the DoW innovation ecosystem, including programs, procurement, and mission priorities.
• Experience supporting or participating in hackathons, integration events, or innovation sprints in a technical leadership capacity.
• Ability to operate in ambiguous, fast-moving environments and build structure where none exists.
• Track record of delivering technical solutions that outlast the event or sprint that created them.

Travel

Travel is expected multiple times per year to support event execution and stakeholder engagement, primarily within the continental United States, but occasionally OCONUS as required.

Benefits

• 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:
  • 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).

Company Description

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.