General Manager - Aerospace & Defense

TL;DR: If you:

• have grown P&L from 0→10 in a complex industry;
• have one foot in AI and another in aerospace & defense;
• are a hard-charging leader who likes to move fast, drive performance, and deliver results…

… you should apply for this role!

About P-1 AI:

At P-1 AI, we are building an AI engineer agent for the physical world named Archie. We maximize Archie’s anthropomorphism so that he fits seamlessly into existing engineering teams and workflows in the form factor of a human engineer. Archie today is at the level of a junior mechanical and electrical engineer, with a quantitative intuition over the product design space and the ability to use complex engineering tools—the same tools his human teammates use. Archie's tech stack includes a custom agentic harness, structured design representation, continual skills learning, and small custom post-trained models (SFT and RLVR) using proprietary semi-synthetic training data sets and environments which create a deep competitive moat. Our ultimate aim is to build engineering ASI. We recently announced a $50 million Series A financing led by NEA, which added former General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt to our board. The round also included the addition of several AI luminaries from Anthropic and Nominal to our existing angel investors from Google and OpenAI.

About the opportunity:

You will build our aerospace & defense business from the ground up and be responsible for its P&L growth. You will own the end-to-end customer journey, growth, and strategic partnerships. You will be responsible for building P-1 Defense, our FOCI-mitigated subsidiary. You will work closely with the CEO and the rest of the leadership team on go-to-market strategy and the product roadmap. You'll have significant autonomy and the opportunity to build a category-defining business around engineering AI.

In this role you will have primary responsibility for business development and sales, marketing and comms, partnerships, infrastructure and compliance, security, customer success, growth, and P&L realization, and significant but shared responsibility with other members of the leadership team for product definition and forward-deployed engineering.

About the role:

• Build and execute the strategy for P-1 AI's expansion into aerospace & defense, including customer acquisition, partnerships, market positioning, and long-term growth.
• Own the P&L for the aerospace & defense business, including revenue targets, growth initiatives, budgeting, and operational performance.
• Build relationships with engineering leaders, executives, program managers, and government stakeholders across aerospace & defense primes, startups, and government customers.
• Identify, negotiate, and manage strategic partnerships that accelerate customer acquisition, program execution, and data access.
• Work closely with customers and forward deployed engineers to translate real-world engineering problems into product requirements and new capabilities for Archie.
• Stand up the people, processes, and systems required to operate in regulated defense environments, including ITAR, NISPOM, and other industrial security requirements.
• Build the foundations of P-1 Defense, including team structure, customer workflows, and operating rhythms as the business scales.

About you:

• You've owned P&L for a business unit, startup, or major program.
• You've taken products, programs, or books of business from 0→1 (and ideally 0→10) and know how to create momentum where none previously existed.
• You've negotiated and closed complex deals involving multiple stakeholders and long sales cycles.
• You can credibly engage with engineers, operators, executives, and government customers without changing who you are in the room.
• You've built and maintained senior relationships across defense primes, government organizations, or strategic industry partners.
• You’re fluent in modern AI and have relationships across the AI ecosystem.
• You move with exceptional urgency, autonomy, and a strong bias toward action.
• You're eligible for a US government security clearance. An existing clearance is a plus.

Location:

Role can be remote (US only). Preference for DMV or SF Bay Area. Relocation support available.

Benefits:

Competitive salary, meaningful equity ownership, healthcare, dental, vision, 401(k) match, and unlimited PTO.