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Coalition Ventures and Forge | Incubated companies
Founding Technical Lead — what you will do
- Own the technology. Take a working prototype or a lab result and turn it into a product that ships, with the architecture, team, and roadmap behind it.
- Build the first team. Hire and lead the first engineers. Set the technical bar and the culture.
- Face the customer. Sit with defense and commercial users, understand what they actually need, and decide what gets built and what does not.
- Raise. Own the technical story in front of investors, partners, and government customers alongside the business lead.
- Decide. Make the calls on build vs. buy, open vs. closed, and where the moat is.
What we are looking for
- Deep hands-on skill in at least one of our areas: computing hardware and silicon, RF and communications, autonomy and robotics, or advanced manufacturing. You have shipped real systems, not just papers or decks.
- Someone who has led engineers before, or is clearly ready to.
- Comfort with a blank page. No roadmap, no team, no process until you build them.
- A builder mindset with AI, agents, and modern tooling. You use them to move faster and expect your team to.
- Appetite for dual-use work and the national-security mission behind it. Clearance or the ability to obtain one is a plus, not a requirement.
- Commercial judgment. You know the difference between a demo and a product, and between a pilot and a contract.
Founding Business and Operations Lead — what you will do
- Find the first customers. Get in front of the people who will buy, whether that is a program office, a prime, or a commercial operator, and close.
- Run the company. Finance, hiring, contracts, compliance, facilities, and the hundred things a founder does before there is anyone else to do them.
- Navigate government. Work SBIRs, OTAs, and the acquisition pathways that get a new technology into a program of record, with Coalition's help.
- Raise. Own the business story in front of investors alongside the technical lead, and build the model that backs it.
- Build the team. Recruit the early hires beyond engineering and set up how the company works.
What we are looking for
- Someone who has built or run something: a company, a business unit, a program, a military unit, or a startup function from zero.
- Commercial instinct and comfort selling, especially into defense, government, or industrial customers.
- Operating range. You can read a cap table, write a contract redline, and set up payroll in the same week.
- A builder mindset with AI, agents, and tooling. You automate the back office rather than hire for it.
- Appetite for dual-use work and the national-security mission behind it. Military or government experience is a plus, not a requirement.
- Low ego, high ownership. You are the person who makes sure it gets done.
Companies we are forming
Detail on the current opportunities is shared directly once we have your note below.