Senior Business Operations Manager

Vannevar builds AI systems for the Department of War's most consequential missions. We have 125 deployments across every branch and combatant command spanning our core platform and five distinct products. An an example of how we work, when major combat operations started with Iran, we fielded a new product supporting 24/7 operations and 9,000+ users in three months.

How we build is our advantage: we deploy forward with the people who own the mission. Our engineers, product team, and CTO deploy forward to the point of friction, including visiting units in Ukraine. We focus on embedding directly with operational units supporting great power competition with China, combat operations with Iran, and counter-narcotics missions.

About the role

We’re looking for a Senior Business Operations Manager to join a small, high-impact team that works on the company’s most important operational and strategic problems. This is a high-ownership position where you’ll drive real outcomes across the company and help us scale effectively from day one.

In your first six months, you’ll focus on two main priorities. First, you’ll partner with leaders in our mission and engineering teams to build our system for managing customer delivery (against 9-figures of deals) and to fill gaps in the capabilities we need to execute against our customer and product priorities. Second, you’ll build the core business and operational systems and lightweight processes that will help us scale.

After that, you’ll help us source, attract, and onboard the key specialized and senior talent we need for our growth areas, and work more closely within a select customer/mission area to shape the business and operating model for one of the fastest growing parts of our business.

The role offers extensive opportunity to work with executives and leaders across the company, and growth trajectories to lead Business Operations at Vannevar or move laterally to help lead another function or line of business.

What you’ll do

• Customer delivery and commercial operations
• — Vannevar has scaled to win deployments with every US Military Service and Combatant Command and with international customers, other federal agencies, and more. Each deployment carries its own delivery obligations and service objectives, and many customers have distinct practices that impact how we can operate. You’ll work with our mission and engineering teams to build a practical system to ensure seamless and efficient delivery against these obligations. You’ll partner with finance and engineering to help us understand our cost structure and opportunities for improvement, reducing friction to improve our end-users’ experience and our business performance.
• Operational systems for the business
• — We’ve got rapid growth plans for 2027, and need business systems and processes that enable us to scale, collect core business and financial data, and avoid taxing our employees with burdensome tasks. You’ll build and tailor tools, processes, and AI agents to solve a prioritized set of business problems, which may span finance, customer delivery, recruiting, onboarding, HR, vendor/contract management, and other business areas. You’ll build these systems such that other functions can operate them indefinitely or they can run without you, so you can solve the next set of problems.
• Strategy for senior and specialized talent
• — Some of the most important roles for Vannevar’s next phase of growth are ones we haven’t hired before. You’ll help prioritize roles to meet ambitious customer, mission, and product goals, and work closely with senior leadership to develop tailored plans to identify, attract, and hire the right people. You’ll then partner with recruiting to execute those plans, bringing exceptional people to Vannevar and setting them up for success.
• Business and operating model for growth areas
• — Once you understand the company’s priorities, you’ll go deep on a single new and high growth customer/mission area. You’ll work with the teams there to understand the growth opportunity and think creatively about the business and delivery model to unlock the next phase of growth. You’ll need to build a deep understanding of the mission problems we’re solving and how customers can leverage our tools, and combine that with business and operational judgement.
• Special projects
• — Some of the most interesting work you’ll do here won’t fit into a neat category. We’re a fast-growing company with a deliberately lean internal team. Important problems regularly surface and need someone sharp to own them... these problems could look like analyzing a major strategic investment, designing infrastructure for tracking a strategic goal, or identifying why a key process is breaking down and building something better.

What we’re looking for

• ~5-10+ years of relevant work experience. You might come from a national security, management consulting, or high growth startup background — we want to see that you have experience executing and building new things. We’d love to see comfort with recruiting and building strong teams, scaling commercial and business operations, and supporting new business growth.
• Ownership and Autonomy
• — You care about whether things actually work, not whether you followed the right process. You take responsibility for outcomes and don’t wait to be told what to do next.
• Judgment
• — You figure out what the right problem is to work on, not just the one you were handed. You’re comfortable operating with ambiguity. You can decide when it makes sense to build something lightweight and fast, and when it’s worth investing more.
• Speed and Efficiency
• — You know how to move quickly, and to build things (processes, tools, etc.) that allow others to move quickly too. You hate time taxes or unnecessary cost and find ways to squeeze that out of systems.
• Plus: comfortable with designing AI agents for ongoing business processes; strong cross-functional project execution; know how to quickly build credibility with senior leaders.

What we offer

The salary range for this position is $185,000 - $230,000 + equity. Within the range, individual pay is determined by experience, relevant education, and/or training.

We’re proud to offer competitive benefits that support our employees. Some key highlights of our benefits package include:

• Health, dental, and vision insurance
• Remote friendly with WeWork access
• Unlimited PTO, shared downtime during the federal holiday calendar, and company-wide off time at the end of each year
• 401(k) match
• Lifestyle & wellbeing stipends