Defense Acquisition Domain Expert

The defense market is surging, but the data that drives it hasn’t kept up. Companies, government, and investors are forced to perform heavily manual processes and piece together hundreds of disparate sources to make decisions. Obviant is building a data source of truth and AI tools for defense acquisition to solve this. We fuse information from thousands of sources – structured + unstructured – to provide a cohesive picture of budget, programs, the organizations running them, and much more. Whether it’s a company navigating GTM or a program manager developing capabilities, we’re providing all sides with the intelligence they need to execute effectively. We’re growing fast and backed by top funds and DoD/national security veterans.

We believe that public sector mission sets matter above anything else. If you feel the same way, we’d love for you to join us.

The role

As our Defense Acquisition Data SME, you make sure the data behind Obviant is right — and that it means what acquisition professionals think it means. You sit between the people who know how a program element, a contract line item, or a milestone decision actually works and the engineers and managers who turn that knowledge into models, pipelines, and products.

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You're a defense acquisition expert first. You understand how the system works end to end, and you know the data systems that record it well enough to explain their strengths and blind spots.

• 6+ years in defense acquisition, budgeting, or contracting e.g., program office, comptroller/financial management, contracting, PPBE, either as a government employee or a contractor supporting those functions

• Complete working knowledge of the defense acquisition system from requirements (e.g., JCIDS), funding (e.g., PPBE), and management (e.g., DAS)

• Fluency in budget concepts: appropriations and colors of money, program elements and budget line items, justification exhibits (R-1, P-1, J-books), and how funds move from request to obligation

• Understanding of contracting vehicles, contract types, and how awards and modifications are made and reported

• Deep familiarity with the DoW data systems of record behind acquisition, budget, or contracts or related domains including what they contain, what they omit, reporting lags, and where they conflict

• Strong analytical skills; comfortable working hands-on with large, messy datasets in Excel or similar tools

• Ability to explain complex concepts plainly to engineers, customers, and executives

• Comfort with ambiguity and incomplete data you know what "good enough" is and isn't

• Strong written communication; you document what you know so others can use it
  

• DAWIA / DAU certification (Program Management, Contracting, or Business – Financial Management)

• Experience at DoD/DoW, a military service, DIU, or a defense-focused consultancy or FFRDC

• Familiarity with LLMs, retrieval, or evaluating AI-generated answers

• Experience querying data with SQL or Python

• Active security clearance
  

• The product team and engineers come to you first when they need to know how a budget, program, or contract concept actually works.

• You've documented what each of our core sources contains, what it leaves out, and its known limitations, and the team uses that reference every day.

• Customers trust our data because you can explain where it comes from, what it means, and where its caveats are.

• Our AI features give accurate, acquisition-grade answers, backed by test questions and reviews you've built.

• You catch substantive errors numbers that look valid but don't match how acquisition works before users do.

• You've helped shape new product features by turning real acquisition workflows and user questions into clear requirements.
  

We live these every day. If they don't sound like you, this won't be a fit and we'd both rather know now.