Capture and Bid Manager

About Arondite

Arondite enables organisations to wield autonomy, data and AI at scale. We equip operators with the foundational software to orchestrate their mix of platforms and capabilities and take mission-critical decisions faster than their adversaries.

We exist to ensure the UK and its allies out-think, out-pace and out-adapt those who seek to threaten our values and way of life. Our technology is designed for deployment in the world’s most austere environments, and is relied upon by the world’s most demanding operators. We deploy alongside them, bringing our technical expertise wherever it is needed.

You will join Arondite at a pivotal moment in the company’s journey. We are ambitious, building for the long-term and backed by globally renowned investors including Index Ventures (Anthropic, Wiz, Figma, Revolut). Our company is being built by exceptional people; people who find high-tempo and challenging work engaging and exciting and who consistently deliver outsized impact.

You will have ownership and autonomy from Day One. There is no corporate ladder at Arondite. We hire the best people and give them extremely high levels of autonomy; the sky is the limit for an individual with the right ambition.

If you are motivated by our mission and if you want to be part of an outstanding team, then we want to hear from you.

About the role

You will be Arondite’s first Capture and Bid Manager.

A large share of our growth will come through proposals, competitive tenders and framework call-offs across defence, national security and policing. Some of our most valuable work will come from proposals we put to customers ourselves, and where a bid is required, the strongest submissions come from understanding the customer’s problem well before the requirement is written down. Our business development team builds that understanding through its customer relationships; you take it and craft it into proposals and bids our customers are excited to select. That starts with a capture plan for each pursuit, a clear view of the competition and the framing that will win, and making decisive bid/no-bid calls. When the tender lands, you forge that work into a compliant submission that scores well against the evaluation criteria.

This is a craft: every submission should be as effective as the capability it describes. Defence requirements are often abstruse and written in operational language that few people outside the user community fully understand. You will read them as a customer would, work out what the operator actually needs, and write an answer that both the technical and the operational evaluators rate as best capturing what they asked for. We expect your writing to be exceptional, and it must stay so under deadline pressure.

You will run each pursuit from qualification through to submission and debrief. You will plan capture with business development, then lead a bid team drawn from engineering, deployment, commercial and legal, for whom the bid is one job among several. You will also write much of the response yourself. Cobalt is highly technical and broad in scope, so you will need to learn it in depth and describe it accurately without relying on an engineer for every paragraph.

There is no bid or capture function to inherit. You will build our process, review governance and content library, with GTM Operations building the tooling behind them. You might have managed individual bids at an enterprise software company, defence prime or consultancy, and now you’re ready to own the whole function.

Your responsibilities will include

• Build a capture plan with the business development team for every qualified pursuit, covering the customer’s need and funding, the competition and price-to-win, our differentiators, win themes and teaming, and run the bid/no-bid gate reviews
• Write the proposals that come before a competition: unsolicited proposals, white papers and business cases that create demand, and our responses to customer requests and RFIs
• Run Arondite’s bids end to end, from bid plan and storyboards through colour reviews to submission, leading engineers, Deployment Strategists, commercial and legal colleagues across several concurrent bids.
• Write and edit the core of each response, working with our engineers to represent Cobalt accurately and with commercial, legal and partners on compliance, pricing, terms, clarifications and teaming
• Run retros and win/loss reviews, and feed what you learn into our positioning, pricing and product.
• Create and own the bid and capture process and a content library used across the business, with GTM Operations building the tooling behind them

Requirements

You should have:

• A track record of winning complex, high-value contracts with UK government or defence customers, having managed competitive bids from qualification through to submission
• A strong grasp of the nuances of UK defence procurement, including the Procurement Act 2023, frameworks and dynamic markets, and how evaluators score
• Experience running capture on government or defence pursuits alongside business development: competitor assessment, win themes and shaping before release
• Experience writing proposals or white papers that created demand where no formal requirement existed
• Outstanding writing: clear, compelling narratives that resonate with military and government evaluators, and precise answers to complex technical and operational requirements, held to that standard under deadline pressure
• The ability to explain complex technical and commercial concepts clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders, and to learn our product in enough depth to do so without support
• Strong commercial acumen, including pricing strategy, contract types and how to structure a competitive offer
• Experience leading bid teams made up of people who do not report to you, across several bids at once
• The judgement to balance scrappiness with rigour

Ideally, you would also have:

• Experience bidding software, data or AI capabilities into defence, national security or policing customers
• APMP accreditation, Shipley training or an equivalent structured capture and bid methodology
• Experience bidding both as a prime and as a subcontractor to a prime
• Familiarity with DEFCONs, Cyber Essentials Plus, the Defence Cyber Protection Partnership (DCPP) and social value requirements
• An existing clearance, or eligibility for UK security vetting

We know the ideal candidate may not match every line item exactly. If this role is close to your experience and you are motivated by the mission, we would still like to hear from you.

Security clearance

We believe in working closely with defence customers. As a result, this role is likely to require you to hold a clearance or be willing to undergo UK security vetting to Security Check (SC) or above. This normally requires having continuous residency in the UK for at least 5 years.

Office vs hybrid working

We are focused on building a positive, collaborative engineering-driven culture. We therefore believe in making the office a friendly, comfortable and fun place to be, and we try to work from the office where possible. Of course, there are times when it makes sense for you to work from home and that's OK. You may also need to travel to visit customers, depending on your role. But in general you should only apply to join Arondite if you're excited to come into the office and work in person by default.

Application process

Generally, after CV submission and questions, our interview process is comprised of the following stages:

• Introductory Teams call with Talent Team (30 mins)
• Introductory Teams call with Hiring Manager (45-60 mins)
• In-person panel interview (60 mins)
• In-person scenario-based interview (60 mins)
• Final interview with Arondite’s Founders (60 mins)

Benefits

• Highly competitive base salary
• Generous equity in EMI share options in a well-funded and growing startup
• 7% employer pension contribution
• Free meals in the office every day
• Private health and dental insurance
• Cycle to work scheme
• Relocation support
• Visa sponsorship for extremely strong candidates
• Access to any resources, equipment and training that you need to do your job in a world-class way
• The opportunity to work with and learn from exceptional colleagues with excellent academic experience and deep industry knowledge