Senior Manager for Strategic Partnerships

About Castelion

Castelion is bringing a new approach to defense development and production: one that focuses on short, iterative design cycles, rapid testing in development, and modern commercial manufacturing strategies for production at scale. We're designing, building, and testing next generation long range strike weapons systems to give America and its Allies a definitive edge and deter future conflicts.

Senior Manager for Strategic Partnerships

Castelion is seeking an exceptional leader to serve as Senior Manager for Strategic Partnerships, driving the company's collaboration strategy across the national security innovation ecosystem. In this role, you will formulate and execute Castelion's partnership strategy building enduring relationships with government, national laboratories, university-affiliated research centers (UARCs), and industry partners to ease and accelerate technology development, prototyping, and transition to production of affordable, mass-producible hypersonic missile systems.

You will shape Castelion's engagement across the defense research and industrial base, securing access to critical technologies, materials, and expertise that advance our mission. This includes building trusted interfaces within the Office of the Assistant Secretary of War (ASOW) Industrial Base Policy (IBP) to align government investment priorities with Castelion's technology roadmap and secure funding. You will play a central role ensuring Castelion remains at the forefront of hypersonic capability delivery.

Responsibilities

• Formulate and execute Castelion's strategic partnerships strategy, spanning government, academia, and industry to advance scalable, affordable hypersonic weapon system technology development and transition.
• Serve as Castelion's primary liaison to ASOW ICAM and DPA Title III offices, and other technology transition and industrial base offices, identifying opportunities for collaboration, securing investments, and scaling capacity.
• Build and sustain partnerships with national labs, UARCs, FFRDCs, and industry collaborators to accelerate design, prototyping, testing, and fielding.
• Collaborate closely with executive leadership, program development, and engineering teams to identify emerging opportunities and potential strategic alliances, ensuring partnerships directly support programmatic and corporate goals.
• Coordinate technology transition initiatives, integrating mature technologies into development and production programs aligned with national defense priorities.
• Manage a partnership and proposal pipeline, including drafting agreements, white papers, and funding applications for initiatives with government and other private-sector entities.
• Establish feedback loops and methods for tracking transitioning technologies, assessing partnership impact, and enhancing collaboration.
• Represent Castelion at high-level forums, workshops, and technical interchange meetings to position the company as a trusted, forward-leaning partner in the hypersonic enterprise.

Preferred Skills and Experience

• Deep familiarity with the U.S. defense innovation enterprise and the ability to convert strategic relationships into tangible outcomes.
• Proven experience leading strategic partnerships or external engagements in the defense, aerospace, or advanced technology sectors.
• Strong understanding of the DoW research and acquisition landscape, including organizations such as ASOW (IBP) and UARC/National Lab systems.
• Demonstrated success in technology transition, cooperative agreements, or public/private partnership.
• Experience working with or within OSD ICAM, DPA Title III, or related offices.
• Proficiency in proposal writing, evaluation frameworks, and partnership performance tracking.
• Excellent communication, negotiation, and relationship-building skills with senior government, academic, and industry stakeholders.
• Technical literacy in advanced weapons, materials, propulsion, or manufacturing systems desirable.
• Prior military, government lab, or defense contractor experience preferred.
• Active Top Secret clearance (or eligibility) strongly preferred.

All employees are granted long-term stock incentives as part of their employment at Castelion. All employees receive access to comprehensive medical, vision, and dental insurance, and the company offers four weeks of paid time off per year.

Leadership Qualities

Bias to Action and Creative Problem Solving. Desire and experience questioning assumptions in ways that lead to break through ideas that are ultimately implemented. Successfully bring in applicable processes/concepts/materials from other industries to achieve efficiency gains. Ability to personally resolve minor issues in development without requiring significant support.

High Commitment, High Initiative. A successful candidate will have a genuine passion for Castelion's mission and consistently look for ways to contribute to the company's technical goals and prevent hardware blockers. Ability to work in a fast paced, autonomously driven, and demanding atmosphere. Strong sense of accountability and integrity.

Clear Communicator. Proactively communicates blockers. Trusted in previous roles to be voice of company with regulators, suppliers, gate keepers and customers. Capable of tactfully managing relationships with stakeholders to achieve company-desired outcomes without compromising relationships. Emails, IMs and verbal interactions are logical, drive clarity, and detailed enough to eliminate ambiguity.

ITAR Requirements:

• To conform to U.S. Government export regulations, applicant must be a (i) U.S. citizen or national, (ii) U.S. lawful, permanent resident (aka green card holder), (iii) Refugee under 8 U.S.C. § 1157, or (iv) Asylee under 8 U.S.C. § 1158, or be eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State.

Employment with Castelion is governed on the basis of competence and qualifications and will not be influenced in any manner by race, color, religion, gender, national origin/ethnicity, veteran status, disability status, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, mental or physical disability or any other legally protected status.