Deployment Strategist

Salary Range: 140000 to 220000 (Currency: USD) (Pay period: per-year-salary)

Core Responsibilities

Own the outcome of a program end to end: define what success means, choose the problems worth solving and the order to solve them in, and set what each milestone has to prove.

Embed with government and industry customers to understand their mission, their constraints, and their politics, and build relationships from end users to program executives that make a deployment durable.

Set direction and priorities for a small Forward Deployed Engineering team without intermediating between engineers and users, and protect their time from everything that is not the work.

Own the growth thesis: option years, follow-ons, and expansions grow out of delivered outcomes, and they are your responsibility to shape from inside the relationship.

Feed what you learn in the field back into product and engineering, so the platform gets better for every customer, not just the one in front of you.

Work day-to-day at or travel to customer sites, test events, hackathons, and program milestones as needed.  Travel is typically domestic, though some customer engagements require international travel.  Typically is domestic, though some customer engagements require international travel.

Qualifications / Who thrives in this role

We hire for judgment, curiosity, and a bias toward action more than for a specific degree or years of experience. That said, people who do well in this role tend to share a few things:

• A track record of owning an outcome with no formal authority over the people delivering it, and finding that energizing rather than alarming.

• Insider fluency in the following customer domain… the kind that comes from having lived it, along with a clear view of what is broken in how that world works today.

Domain: commercial space development at scale — launch vehicles, engines, and spacecraft moving from first flight to reflight and rate production inside a vertically integrated engineering organization, where requirements, simulation, and test evidence sprawl across toolchains and increasingly must be packaged as certification-grade proof for government customers.

• Technical conversancy across modeling and simulation, MBSE, digital threads, software development, and/or agentic design: enough to interrogate an engineering claim and be credible doing it, not necessarily enough to build it yourself.

• Product sense, because this role sits closer to product management than to project management: knowing what to build next and what not to build at all, and telling the difference between a request that serves one user and a capability that belongs in the platform.

• The range to brief a program executive in the morning and pair with an engineer in the afternoon.

• An instinct for reading rooms and organizational dynamics, because adoption is won in the customer's org chart as much as in the software.

• Comfort operating with incomplete information and shifting requirements, and the initiative to define next steps without being told.

Preferred, not required

• Highly desired: Experience in a forward deployed, deployment strategist, or field delivery role at a technology or defense company.

• A track record of converting delivery into growth: an option year exercised, an expansion won, a pilot that became a program of record.

• Eligibility to obtain and hold a U.S. security clearance, given the classified and controlled environments this role supports.

Why Istari?

You will work directly with the executives and engineers building the company, not through layers of process. You will see your work reach real programs and real missions quickly – the outcomes you own here end in test events and fielded systems, not slide decks – and you will have room to shape a role that does not yet have a fixed definition. This is a small team solving a problem that matters, and we are looking for people who want to build the next chapter of it with us.