Lead Proposals Manager

Join Axon and be a Force for Good. At Axon, we’re on a mission to Protect Life. We’re explorers, pursuing society’s most critical safety and justice issues with our ecosystem of devices and cloud software. Like our products, we work better together. We connect with candor and care, seeking out diverse perspectives from our customers, communities and each other. Life at Axon is fast-paced, challenging and meaningful. Here, you’ll take ownership and drive real change. Constantly grow as you work hard for a mission that matters at a company where you matter. Lead Proposal Manager, UK & Ireland Your Impact As a Lead Proposal Manager, you will lead Axon’s most complex and highest-impact RFP and tender responses, proposals, and other customer-facing selling documents across the UK and Ireland. You’ll be a member of a global team that supports Axon sales worldwide and will serve as the senior proposal execution lead for the region. You will own proposal development from early procurement engagement through submission and evaluation-period follow-up, translating established win strategy into a controlled response plan and ensuring the final submission is compliant, responsive, scorable, customer-focused, and on time. Your strengths in judgment under ambiguity, cross-functional leadership, technical and proposal writing, and compliance discipline will be central to success. Focused primarily on UK and Ireland public-sector opportunities, you will work closely with Sales, Bid Strategy, Solutions Engineering, Product, Legal, Security, Pricing, Finance, Services, and executive stakeholders. You will personally lead the hardest pursuits while also strengthening regional proposal readiness, reusable standards, coaching, and execution across bids owned by other Proposal Managers. This is an office-based position in the United Kingdom. What You’ll Do Location: hybrid schedule of Monday working remotely, and Tue-Fri in our London office Reports to: Director, Global Proposals Direct Reports: N/A At Axon, the Lead Proposal Manager is the senior owner of proposal execution for the region’s most complex pursuits. You will engage early in the procurement process, establish how the response will be run, make execution and compliance decisions within approved boundaries, and carry the proposal through submission and evaluation-period deliverables. This is a comprehensive individual-contributor role requiring expertise in the following areas: Proposal Planning & Execution: Translate established win strategy into an executable response architecture, including workstreams, assignments, proof collection, review cadence, decision gates, and submission-readiness criteria. Build pre-bid readiness for anticipated strategic procurements with Sales and Bid Strategy. Drive resolution of product exceptions, compliance issues, and proposal commitments through the appropriate approval paths, while partnering with Sales, Bid Strategy, Pricing, and leadership on commercial, account-strategy, and bid decisions. Team Leadership: Lead large cross-functional teams across Sales, Solutions Engineering, Product, Legal, Security, Pricing, Finance, Services, Proposal Team members, and executive stakeholders. Drive decisions, close gaps, enforce deadlines, adjudicate conflicting review input, and coach Proposal Managers and Specialists to improve execution judgment, compliance discipline, and independent ownership. Project & Compliance Management: Own proposal governance, milestones, compliance traceability, mandatory requirements, forms, schedules, portals, review cycles, final packaging, and submission readiness. Identify and manage disqualification and responsiveness risks, and preserve proposal context through structured handoff of assumptions, exceptions, commitments, and unresolved risks during clarification, presentation, and other evaluation-period activity. Proposal Writing & Solution Fluency: Develop technical and solution fluency to challenge weak claims, identify risk, and frame partial or non-compliant requirements carefully. Write, edit, and integrate high-value content when SME inputs are incomplete, inconsistent, overly technical, or insufficiently responsive, producing a coherent response for technical and non-technical evaluators. Regional Leadership & Stakeholder Collaboration: Build strong operating relationships with UK and Ireland Sales and technical leaders, monitor regional delivery health, identify where pursuits need additional support or escalation, and provide Proposal Leadership with recommendations on complex-pursuit routing and resourcing. Identify repeatable success and failure patterns and improve regional execution through reusable standards, tools, proof sources, training, and workflow changes. What You Bring Typically 8+ years of proposal, bid, tender, or comparable pursuit experience, including repeated end-to-end ownership of large, ambiguous, high-stakes submissions with significant cross-functional stakeholder load…