istaridigital.ai - Deployment Strategist

• 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.