Red Cell Partners

• Lead DoW business development efforts • Build and manage pipeline across contracts, OTAs, and SBIRs • Engage directly with Pentagon and senior defense stakeholders • Shape and capture opportunities from early identification through award • Develop partnerships with primes, innovation orgs, and tech companies • Advise leadership on growth strategy and market positioning

Role Description As the Staff DevSecOps Engineer, you will be the technical owner of how security is built into Trase's software development lifecycle and cloud operations. - Integrate automated security testing, continuous vulnerability management, and secure coding practices directly into existing CI/CD pipelines. - Own the implementation of Trase's dedicated security architecture, delivering shift-left tooling (SAST, DAST, SCA, secrets scanning, and IaC scanning) alongside production cloud security services. - Standardize and operate secure pipelines to empower Trase's software engineers while maintaining required controls and capabilities. Qualifications - 10+ years of experience in security engineering, DevSecOps, cloud security, or platform security roles. - Deep, hands-on experience securing modern CI/CD pipelines. - Strong cloud security expertise, primarily in Google Cloud Platform. - Expert-level Terraform skills with a track record of building secure-by-default IaC modules. - Demonstrated experience with SIEM operations and incident response leadership. - Practical experience in environments governed by SOC 2, HIPAA, and ISO 27001. - Strong programming or scripting skills (Python, Go, or similar). - Excellent partnership skills and a developer-empathetic mindset. - Strong affinity for working with LLMs and AI agents. - US Citizen and eligible for US security clearance. Requirements - Design, implement, and operate the shift-left security toolchain across Trase's CI/CD pipelines. - Define how findings are triaged, routed, and remediated. - Establish and enforce policy-as-code and pre-merge security gates. - Design and deploy Trase's production cloud security architecture. - Implement foundational controls including network segmentation and workload identity. - Build, codify, and maintain secure-by-default infrastructure modules in Terraform. - Operate and fine-tune Trase's SIEM and security telemetry pipeline. - Enhance and lead aspects of Trase's technical security incident response capability. - Operate the end-to-end vulnerability management lifecycle. - Partner closely with Engineering and the broader Security and Compliance team. - Mentor junior Security and Compliance engineers and members of the Engineering team. Benefits - Career track opportunity with potential for rapid advancement. - 100% employer paid, comprehensive health care including medical, dental, and vision for you and your family. - Paid maternity and paternity for 14 weeks at employees' normal pay. - Unlimited PTO, with management approval. - Opportunities for professional development and continued learning. - Optional 401K, FSA, and equity incentives available. - Mental health benefits available through Tara Mind. - Cost effective GLP-1 solutions available through Crux.

• End-to-End Product Engineering: Rapidly prototype and scale full-stack applications, ensuring seamless integration between UI, business logic, and ML inference. • Architectural Leadership: Design modular, extensible system architectures that support rapid iteration without accruing technical debt. • Technical Governance: Lead code reviews across the stack and serve as escalation point for engineering, infrastructure, and security decisions. • Risk & Remediation: Identify scalability bottlenecks and security vulnerabilities and present remediation strategies. • Bridge Research & Product: Translate experimental ML techniques into production-ready features. • Infrastructure & Compliance: Design infrastructure aligned with government audit requirements (e.g., HIPAA, FedRAMP). • Security-First Development: Implement IAM and secure data practices across the lifecycle. • AI-First Product Ownership: Drive conception and execution of AI-first products, maintaining a strong bias toward applying state-of-the-art capabilities in production environments.

• Turn Ideas into Products: Take loosely defined problems and transform them into concrete product directions, break down ambiguous concepts into structured technical approaches, and rapidly prototype and validate ideas using modern AI-augmented workflows. • Build 0→1 Across Incubations: Act as an early engineering force for new startups, build initial products, APIs, workflows, and prototypes that define the business, and help shape product direction alongside partners and founders. • Operate Like a Founder: Understand business context and define what should be built—not just how, evaluate tradeoffs across product, speed, and technical design, and adapt quickly as ideas evolve and new information emerge. • Build in an AI-Native Way: Use AI tools to accelerate development, structure prompts, workflows, and iterations intentionally, and demonstrate strong problem framing, decomposition, and iteration style.

• Rapidly prototype and build full-stack tools and visualizations to support researchers and entrepreneurs. • Design, implement, test, and debug code across front-end, back-end, and data pipelines. • Collaborate with research teams to translate cutting-edge ML techniques into production-ready solutions. • Work with entrepreneurs and users to gather requirements, incorporate feedback, and iterate on product development. • Develop and optimize robust pipelines for model fine-tuning, evaluation, and deployment. • Establish best practices for reliable and reproducible ML model development. • Contribute to the creation of scalable, high-performance infrastructure for AI-driven products.

• Define and evolve the long-term AI/ML research strategy and technical roadmap for Trase OS in alignment with product and platform direction. • Lead large-scale experimentation and prototyping efforts requiring significant compute infrastructure, translating frontier AI research into scalable, production-grade systems with measurable impact. • Drive original research and technical breakthroughs in agentic systems, autonomous execution, multi-agent orchestration, post-training and fine-tuning systems, SLM/LLM-based architectures, and applied AI infrastructure. • Design how models operate within long-lived execution environments, including agent workflows, tool use, planning, memory systems, reasoning, and human-in-the-loop controls. • Establish evaluation methodologies and reliability frameworks for autonomous systems, including benchmarking, regression testing, safety, controllability, and production behavior analysis. • Drive architecture decisions across orchestration, model serving, routing, inference, and infrastructure governance, including latency, reliability, and cost optimization. • Partner closely with engineering and product teams to operationalize research outcomes into deployable systems and enterprise workflows. • Build AI systems that operate reliably in regulated and constrained environments, including secure cloud, on-premise, and air-gapped deployments. • Contribute to the broader AI research community through technical papers, publications, conference participation, architecture proposals, and thought leadership. • Serve as a senior technical authority and mentor across the organization, influencing technical direction, research rigor, experimentation practices, and best practices across research, engineering, and product teams.

• Lead Capture Strategy • Develop and execute capture plans for priority opportunities across the DoD and broader federal market. • Partner with customer-facing teams and growth leaders to gather customer insight, shape requirements, and refine opportunity strategy before solicitation. • Build win themes, discriminators, competitor analysis, and teaming strategies that improve probability of win. • Support bid/no-bid decisions, stage-gate reviews, and pursuit of governance for the highest-priority deals. • Partner with finance, legal, and engineering to shape pricing strategy, cost narratives, and contract structures that are competitive, compliant, and executable. • Lead the transition from capture to award by ensuring alignment across customer need, solution approach, pricing, realistic timelines, and contractual path. • Support negotiations and contract finalization in partnership with legal, finance, and executive stakeholders. • Partner with proposal management and writing support to ensure proposals are compliant, persuasive, and tightly aligned to win strategy.

• Shape the product architecture end-to-end. • Own the data foundation. • Engineer for performance at scale. • Drive technical direction through RFCs. • Ship with product and design, not in a silo. • Use AI as a force multiplier (responsibly). • Hold the quality bar high.

Role Description Red Cell Partners is building something fundamentally different from any other organization in the defense innovation ecosystem: a venture builder designed to identify critical national security problems, build companies around them, and scale those companies into enduring capabilities for the U.S. Department of War and federal government. The Head of Defense Growth is the senior leader responsible for translating that ambition into real-world impact. This role sits at the intersection of venture creation, mission problem-solving, and federal scale-up. You will define how Red Cell and the companies it builds identify opportunities, shape demand, win programs, and grow into long-term solutions for the American warfighter. This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who wants to build the system, not inherit one. What You’ll Do - Define, own, and operationalize Red Cell’s public sector and DoW growth strategy across priority missions, agencies, and acquisition pathways. - Lead “left-of-bang” shaping with mission owners, program offices, contracting offices, and other acquisition stakeholders before solicitations exist. - Set bid/no-bid decisions and prioritize opportunities across the portfolio. - Architect creative solutions that may include leveraging capabilities from multiple portfolio companies with a focus on solving hard mission problems and accelerating adoption. - Build and run a scalable BD → Capture → Close growth engine that portfolio companies can plug into. - Recruit, mentor, and lead a high-ownership growth team spanning BD, capture, proposals, and contracts. What Success Looks Like - A clear, differentiated Red Cell presence across priority DoW and federal mission areas. - A portfolio-wide pipeline that consistently converts early engagement into real programs. - Faster transitions from pilot and prototype efforts into enduring programs of record. - A repeatable federal growth engine that compounds across multiple ventures—not just one. Qualifications - A senior public sector growth leader with experience turning complex, technical capabilities into scaled programs. - A creative problem-solver who enjoys working at the edge of structure and inventing new approaches. - Comfortable owning ambiguity, making hard calls, and being accountable for outcomes. - Mission-driven, operator-empathetic, and motivated by solving problems that matter. - Your background should include senior growth, capture, or federal sales leadership roles at high-growth defense technology companies, next-generation primes, or elite GovCon organizations. Requirements - 12–20+ years of private sector experience selling to public sector, at least some of that time in an executive position in either business development, capture, or federal sales, ideally with a focus on defense or national security. - Demonstrated ownership of the full lifecycle from early shaping (“left of bang”) through capture, award, and post-award expansion. - At least $100M+ in cumulative contract value influenced, captured, or closed over the course of a career. - History of moving efforts from prototype/pilot/SBIR/OTA into enduring programs of record. - Strong working knowledge of DoW and federal acquisition pathways, including hands-on experience with FAR/DFARS-based contracts (FFP, CPFF, T&M, hybrids), OTAs, IDIQs/GWACs/BPAs, and innovation-focused mechanisms such as SBIR/STTR, BAAs, CSOs, and rapid acquisition authorities. - Ability to creatively navigate acquisition constraints and identify non-obvious paths to award and scale. - Deep familiarity working with DoW stakeholders and mission owners, such as Program Executive Offices (PEOs) or Portfolio Acquisition Executives (PAEs), PMOs/Requiring Activities, and Combatant Commands. - Track record of engaging credibly with operators, acquisition professionals, and senior government leadership. - Experience selling or scaling technically complex capabilities, such as software platforms, AI/data systems, cyber, EW, autonomy, advanced sensing, or mission-critical infrastructure. - Proven experience acting as a player-coach - setting strategy while personally driving the most important deals. - Experience building or leading BD, capture, proposal, and contracting teams, either directly or in matrixed environments. - Demonstrated ability to establish discipline without bureaucracy: clear bid/no-bid decisions, win themes, pipeline rigor, and accountability. - Active U.S. security clearance or ability and willingness to obtain one. - Strong preference for the Washington, DC metro area (or willingness to relocate). - Expect meaningful time in the field shaping, capturing, and closing. Benefits - Career track opportunity with potential for rapid advancement with strong performance as the firm grows. - 100% employer paid, comprehensive health care including medical, dental, and vision for you and your family. - Paid maternity and paternity for 14 weeks at employees' normal pay. - Unlimited PTO, with management approval. - Opportunities for professional development and continued learning. - Optional 401K, FSA, and equity incentives available. - Mental health benefits are available through Tara Mind. - Cost effective GLP-1 solutions available through Crux. Final Thought Many roles in defense innovation talk about impact. This is one of the rare ones where you can actually create it - by building the growth system that turns bold ideas into real capability for the American warfighter. If you want a role you’re unlikely to find anywhere else in the defense ecosystem, this is it. Salary Range $250,000-$280,000 - This represents the typical salary range for this position based on experience, skills, and other factors.

• Support a broad range of legal matters across the organization, including contract review and negotiation, financings, and regulatory research. • Work closely with the Legal team and receive hands-on mentorship and exposure to legal and business decision-making. • Draft, review, and negotiate commercial agreements, including vendor and customer contracts, NDAs, and service agreements. • Assist in corporate transactions, such as financings, restructurings, and governance matters. • Conduct legal research and analysis on emerging laws and regulations impacting our core industries: healthcare, cyber, and national security. • Collaborate with business leaders and functional teams, providing pragmatic and business-minded legal advice that facilitates innovation and growth. • Contribute to legal team projects to improve operations, compliance, and knowledge management. • Adapt quickly and effectively to shifting priorities in a fast-paced, dynamic environment. • Uphold and contribute to our collaborative, respectful, and high-performance team culture, where humor, humility, and hard work are valued.