DIRECTOR OF BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT AND CAPTURE

Volantyx Aerospace builds the detection and decision layer for airspace threats. Our software, Neurex, fuses acoustic, radar, radio-frequency and electro-optical evidence at the edge, forms and holds tracks, and cues a response with a human on the loop. It runs on sensors a customer already owns, which means a site can be covered without replacing its existing equipment.

We are focused on a specific and growing gap. Most deployed counter-drone systems locate an aircraft by its radio link. Fiber-guided and autonomous aircraft do not provide one. That threat class is now fielded at scale, and the buyers who need an answer to it — airports, ports, stadiums, correctional facilities and critical infrastructure — have funded budgets for the first time.

We are a small, early-stage team headquartered in Saint Petersburg, Florida, backed by founder capital and an active seed round, and working with a service-disabled veteran-owned prime contractor on federal pursuits. The company is pre-revenue and pre-deployment. This is a build role, not a maintain role.

The role

We are hiring a Director of Business Development and Capture to open the commercial market and build the pipeline that carries the company from first conversation to first contract.

This is a first-in role. You will not inherit a pipeline, a CRM full of warm leads, or a marketing engine feeding you meetings. You will build the pipeline from a named target list, get into buildings where nobody has heard of us, and turn technical credibility into commercial commitment. If that prospect is energizing rather than daunting, read on.

Two things make this different from a conventional enterprise sales job. First, you are selling in advance of general availability, so the near-term product is credibility, access and paid assessment work rather than a shipped system. Second, the buying environment is regulated and security-conscious, so the person who wins is the one who understands the customer’s operational and compliance problem, not the one with the best pitch deck.

What you will do

Build and own the commercial pipeline

• Own a named target list across five segments with active budgets — airports, ports, stadiums, correctional facilities and critical infrastructure — and take it from research to qualified conversation to commitment.
• Identify the real buyer in each organization. In this market that is rarely procurement; it is more often the director of public safety, the airport operations executive, the security director or the emergency management lead.
• Run the first meeting yourself, and run it as a discovery conversation about their airspace exposure rather than a product demonstration.
• Maintain an honest pipeline with real stages and real dates. We would rather see a small accurate pipeline than a large optimistic one.

Create early revenue through advisory engagements

• Develop and sell paid assessment work — airspace threat assessments, counter-drone readiness reviews, sensor and site surveys — that delivers genuine value to the customer and puts us inside the building before the product ships.
• Scope, price and deliver those engagements with support from the technical team, and turn the findings into a defensible written product the customer can use with their own leadership and budget holders.
• Use those engagements to build the relationship and the requirement, not as a pretext. A weak assessment costs us more than no assessment.

Secure letters of intent and early commitments

• Convert relationships into written expressions of intent — non-binding letters of intent, pilot commitments, memoranda of understanding — that demonstrate real demand.
• Keep advisory work and commitment letters as separate motions. A letter of intent obtained from a customer we were paid to advise is worth materially less than one obtained independently, and we will not blur that line.
• Never overstate what a document is. A letter of intent is a letter of intent, and we describe it as exactly that internally and externally.

Support the federal pathway

• Work alongside the government programs function on federal opportunities, including SBIR, OTA and prime-contractor subcontract routes. Federal capture is not this role’s primary responsibility, but commercial and federal pipelines inform each other and you will contribute to both.
• Support proposal and capture activity with customer insight, competitive intelligence and win-theme development.

Feed the product

• Bring requirements back. What operators actually need, what they will pay for, what makes them reject a system, and what a false alarm costs them in a real tasking environment.
• Translate that into written input the engineering team can build against, and hold your ground when the answer the customer needs is not the answer the roadmap currently gives.

What we are looking for

Required

• Seven or more years in business development, capture or complex enterprise sales, with a demonstrable record of opening accounts from nothing rather than managing inherited ones.
• Experience selling into at least one of: aviation, critical infrastructure, physical security, public safety, or defense and government.
• Comfort selling a technical product to a technical and operational buyer, and the credibility to hold a substantive conversation about sensing, detection and operational workflow without an engineer in the room.
• Evidence of having built a pipeline from a cold start — named targets, first meetings, qualified opportunities — and of the discipline to report it accurately.
• Willingness to travel regularly, and to be in the room rather than on the call.
• U.S. person as defined at 22 C.F.R. § 120.62, which is required because of export-control obligations attaching to our technology.

Strongly preferred

• Direct experience in counter-UAS, drone detection, physical security systems or airspace operations.
• Existing relationships among airport operators, port authorities, stadium and venue security, correctional facilities or utility and energy security functions.
• Experience selling or delivering paid advisory work as a route into a product relationship.
• Familiarity with federal procurement, including SBIR, OTA and subcontracting through a prime.
• An active or recently lapsed security clearance.
• Military, law enforcement or emergency management background.

How we will assess you

We are less interested in a list of quotas met than in how you think. Expect to be asked to name five organizations you could get a first meeting with inside thirty days and to explain how; to describe an account you opened from nothing and what actually unlocked it; and to talk through a deal you lost and what you would do differently. Expect us to test whether you will represent the company accurately, because in this market a single overstated claim in front of a program officer is expensive.

What we offer

• Item
• Detail
• Equity only with appropriate salary at funding event — commensurate with experience
• Variable compensation
• Performance-based, tied to defined pipeline and commitment milestones rather than revenue alone, given the company's stage
• Equity
• Meaningful stock option grant under the 2026 Equity Incentive Plan, four-year vesting with a twelve-month cliff, subject to Board approval and an independent Section 409A valuation
• Location
• Saint Petersburg, Florida. Hybrid, with regular travel to customer sites
• Reporting
• Reports to the Chief Executive Officer
• Scope
• You will own the commercial pipeline. This is a leadership role in a company small enough that your work is visible and consequential
• What this role is not
• We would rather be direct now than have you discover it in month two.
• •This is not an account management role. There are no existing accounts to manage.
• •This is not a role with a marketing engine behind it. You will generate your own first meetings for some time.
• •You will not be selling a generally available product in the first year. You will be selling credibility, assessment work and a roadmap, to buyers who will test all three.
• •We will not ask you to overstate what the product does, and we will not accept it if you do. Every capability claim we make is tied to evidence, and that discipline applies in customer meetings as much as in investor materials.

Equal opportunity note

Volantyx Aerospace is an equal opportunity employer. We consider all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. Certain positions require U.S. person status under export-control law; where that applies it is stated in the posting and is a legal requirement rather than a preference.