Director of Federal Sales (remote Washington DC)

Spacelift is an infrastructure orchestration platform that manages your entire infrastructure lifecycle — provisioning, configuration and governance. Spacelift integrates with all your infrastructure tooling (e.g. Terraform, OpenTofu, CloudFormation, Pulumi, Ansible) to provide a single integrated workflow so you can deliver secure, cost-effective, and resilient infrastructure, fast. By automating deployment and configuration, providing developer self-service, golden paths with guardrails, and an OPA policy engine, Spacelift empowers businesses to accelerate developer velocity while maintaining control and governance over their infrastructure. Spacelift offers unrivalled support, no-nonsense pricing, and a range of deployment models to fit your specific needs. Spacelift was founded in 2020 by long-time DevOps practitioner Marcin Wyszynski and successful entrepreneur Pawel Hytry and has raised $82.3M in funding over four rounds from top venture capital firms, including Insight Partners, Blossom Capital, Hoxton Ventures, Inovo Venture partners and Five Elms Capital. Federal agencies are modernising infrastructure under tight mandates: zero trust, cloud-smart, and now AI-ready provisioning. They need infrastructure orchestration that meets FedRAMP requirements without slowing developer teams to a crawl. Spacelift is FedRAMP authorised. The pipeline is real. The playbook is not yet written. That's your job. What You'll do Reporting to the SVP of Global Sales, you'll build and run the federal go-to-market motion from the ground up. That means owning the territory plan, the named-account list, the channel strategy, and the first federal wins yourself, while hiring the team that scales it. Day one, you inherit one federal seller and a FedRAMP authorisation that very few of our competitors hold. You'll close deals personally for the first two to three quarters, then layer in AEs and SEs as the pipeline justifies it. Specifically, you will: Own the federal number. Build the plan, forecast it, hit it. Sell hands-on into civilian and DoD agencies and the systems integrators serving them: GDIT, Booz Allen, Accenture Federal, Leidos, and the rest. Stand up and run our contract vehicles. Carahsoft, GSA Schedule, SEWP V/VI, ITES-SW2, and whatever else the deal demands. Partner with marketing on federal events, content, and demand gen. Work with product and engineering on the IL4 and IL5 roadmap as customer demand pulls us up the impact-level ladder. Hire your team. Federal AEs, a federal SE, and eventually a federal channel manager. What You'll bring This role is for someone who has done federal SaaS before, not someone who wants to learn it on our budget. Required Eight or more years of enterprise software sales, with at least four spent selling FedRAMP-authorised SaaS into civilian agencies, DoD, or both. A track record of carrying and hitting a federal quota north of $3M, with at least one deal over $500K ARR. Hands-on experience selling through federal channel partners and contract vehicles: Carahsoft, GSA Schedule, SEWP V/VI, ITES-SW2, or equivalent. You know how to structure a deal so it actually lands. An active network across federal agencies and the top systems integrators. References we can call. Comfort was the only federal leader in the room for the first 12 months. You're a builder first, a manager second. Nice to have Background in selling DevOps, IaC, Kubernetes, observability, or developer platforms. Experience taking a product from FedRAMP Moderate to High, or from FedRAMP to IL4/IL5. Active security clearance. Location & Travel Based in the DC metro or Northern Virginia. Hybrid, with regular travel to agency sites, partner offices, and Spacelift HQ. We expect you to be in front of customers most weeks. Why Now? FedRAMP is the moat. Most of the orchestration market is locked out of the federal market entirely or stuck waiting on an authorisation that takes years. We are through the door, and the federal market is asking for