Account Executive - Intelligence Community
Location: Washington, DC metro (hybrid; SCIF access required) Clearance: Active TS/SCI required. CI or FS poly strongly preferred. Reports to: VP, Federal Sales Travel: ~30%, primarily NCR, COCOM headquarters, and customer site job that is used for creating requisitions 'from scratch'
Why this role exists
Maritime is where great-power competition, sanctions evasion, narcotics trafficking, and illicit proliferation networks all converge - and it is the domain where the intelligence problem is hardest. Vessels go dark. Identities get laundered through shell registries. Ship-to-ship transfers happen at 3 a.m. in a gap between AIS coverage.
Windward built the AI platform that resolves those problems at scale, and the U.S. Intelligence Community is already using it. We are in 24 U.S. government organizations, including three IC elements. Our analytics have contributed materially to CENTCOM operations, with recognition at the highest levels of the U.S. government. Our INDOPACOM program is our flagship past performance.
We are not looking for someone to open the IC. We are looking for someone to take a validated beachhead and turn it into a portfolio - new mission centers, new directorates, new programs of record.
What you'll own
- A named IC account set. You own the full lifecycle across your agencies: account mapping, mission-set discovery, champion development, technical validation, procurement strategy, award, and expansion. There is no hand-off to a farmer. You keep what you close.
- Access at the top. This is a senior-level sale. You will be in front of SES/SIS civilians, flag and general officers, directorate and mission-center chiefs, CTOs and CDOs, and program executives - and you will be expected to earn a second meeting on the strength of the first. Analyst enthusiasm creates pilots; senior sponsorship creates programs of record. You will build both, and you will not mistake one for the other.
- Mission-set fluency, not feature pitching. You will sit with targeters, all-source analysts, collection managers, and program managers and translate their actual workflow gaps into deployed capability. The demo is a means, not the meeting.
- The procurement path. You will architect how the money moves - existing IDIQs, OTAs, GSA, SBIR/CSO on-ramps, sole-source justifications, contractor and SI teaming. You will know which vehicle is real and which one is a mirage before your champion does.
- A teaming network. Primes, SIs, and cleared resellers who can carry Windward on their paper into places we can't reach directly. You identify, vet, and manage them.
- Forecast integrity. MEDDPICC-disciplined qualification and a forecast senior leadership can plan against. We would rather hear "this slips a quarter" in July than in September.
- Voice of the customer. Requirements you surface shape the product roadmap. You are the customer's advocate inside the building, not just our advocate outside it.