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.

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.

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