[Hiring] Deployment Strategist @Istari Digital

Role Description

A Deployment Strategist at Istari is the single accountable owner of a customer program's outcome. You will embed with a small team of forward deployed engineers on one flagship program, or a small set of lighter engagements, and you will decide what matters:

• Which problems the team attacks and in what order.
• What each demonstration, technical interchange, or test event has to prove.
• How the deployment becomes something the customer cannot imagine operating without.

Your responsibilities include:

• Working with a prime's chief engineer or briefing a program executive on schedule risks.
• Having support from a shared Program Operations team that helps with reports and deliverables.
• Owning the outcome and focusing on what the program becomes next.
• Having enough technical range for engineers and customers to trust your judgment.
• Taking ownership of results rather than processes.

Core Responsibilities

• Own the outcome of a program end to end: define success, choose problems to solve, and set milestones.
• Embed with government and industry customers to understand their mission and build relationships.
• Set direction and priorities for a small Forward Deployed Engineering team.
• Own the growth thesis: shape option years, follow-ons, and expansions from delivered outcomes.
• Feed field learnings back into product and engineering to improve the platform.
• Work day-to-day at or travel to customer sites, test events, and program milestones as needed.

Qualifications

• A track record of owning an outcome with no formal authority, finding it energizing.
• Insider fluency in commercial space development at scale.
• Technical conversancy across modeling and simulation, MBSE, digital threads, software development, and/or agentic design.
• Product sense, knowing what to build next and what not to build.
• The range to brief a program executive and pair with an engineer.
• An instinct for reading rooms and organizational dynamics.
• Comfort operating with incomplete information and shifting requirements.

Preferred, not required

• 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.
• Eligibility to obtain and hold a U.S. security clearance.

Benefits

• Compensation range: $140,000 - $220,000 a year.
• Eligibility for bonuses, equity, and a comprehensive benefits package.

Company Description

We are 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.

• We celebrate individual contributions and give feedback early and often.
• We are outcomes-driven and hold each other to a high standard.
• Focus is rewarded; finish is remembered.
• Fellowship is fundamental; make others successful.