Founding Proposal Manager
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- Remote
- Work setup
- Remote
- Seniority
- C level
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- Not specified
- Category
- Sales
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- Four to seven years in federal proposal writing or proposal management, including at least two years as the lead writer or responsible owner on DoW proposals.
- Direct experience with DoW solicitation types: SBIR and STTR, OTAs, CSOs and BAAs, RFPs, and RFIs.
- Excellent writing and editing. You can take a subject matter expert's notes and produce something clear, specific, and scoreable. We will ask for samples.
- Command of compliance: you have built compliance matrices and caught the requirement everyone else missed.
- Comfort owning a schedule and holding senior people to their deadlines.
- Working fluency with modern writing tools, including AI drafting tools, and the judgment to know where they help and where they make writing generic.
- U.S. person, able to obtain and maintain a DoW Secret clearance.
Nice to have
- Capture exposure: you have helped shape an opportunity before the solicitation dropped.
- Experience with SBIR and STTR Phase II, TACFI or STRATFI, and Phase III transition.
- Familiarity with training, readiness, sustainment, or maintenance programs in the Air Force, Army, Navy, or Marine Corps.
- APMP certification, Shipley training, or equivalent.
- Working knowledge of FAR and DFARS as they touch proposals and representations. Contracting experience is a plus but not required.
- Experience at a company under 50 people, where the process you inherit is the process you build.
Full description
About Schemata
At Schemata, we are transforming the $400 B virtual‑training and simulation market by fusing 3D computer vision, neural rendering and large multimodal models inside highly regulated industries. Our platform delivers photorealistic, intelligent 3D experiences, demanding robust spatial reasoning, high‑performance data pipelines and seamless integration between traditional graphics and AI‑driven perception.
About the Role
We submit a lot of federal proposals for a company our size: SBIR and STTR topics, CSO and sBAA white papers, OTA prototype proposals, consortium submissions, and RFI responses. Today that work is carried by our CEO, VP of Business Development, and outside consultants. It gets done, but it pulls our senior people away from customers and new markets, and consultant first drafts still need heavy rewriting before they sound like us.
We are hiring a Founding Proposal Manager to own the writing and the machinery of getting proposals out the door. This is a writing-first role. About 70% of your time goes to drafting and running proposals. About 30% goes to capture support: screening opportunities, shaping early documents, and making sure our bid decisions are made on evidence.
Our sales team owns customer relationships and win strategy. Your job is to turn that strategy into compliant, persuasive, on-time submissions, and to make each one faster and better than the last. This is an individual contributor role. "Manager" refers to managing the proposal, not managing people.
What You'll Own
Proposal writing and management (about 70%)
- Write proposals. Draft technical and management volumes, executive summaries, white papers, solution briefs, and quad charts from engineering and customer input. You are the primary author, not just the editor.
- Turn engineering explanations into prose a technical evaluator can score, and push back when a section is talking past the reader.
- Run every proposal from kickoff to submission: shred the solicitation, build the compliance matrix and outline, set the schedule, name section owners, and hold people (including leadership) to their dates.
- Size the review process to the bid. A SBIR Phase I does not need the same gates as an OTA prototype proposal.
- Coordinate cost volumes and supporting documents with finance and leadership, and verify every required form, certification, and attachment is present.
- Own membership profiles and submission mechanics across DSIP, , and service and consortium portals, including formatting rules and page limits.
- Build and maintain a reusable content library in Google Drive: past performance write-ups, resumes, boilerplate, graphics, and approved capability language.