Deployment Strategist
On-siteHuntsville, Alabama, United States
Job Summary
Define program success and prioritize problems for a forward-deployed engineering team on flagship defense acquisition programs. Embed with government and industry customers to map missions, constraints, and politics, then build relationships from end users to program executives. Serve as the named Program Manager on major federal contracts, carrying the narrative through status reports, technical interchanges, and review boards while standing accountable for all deliverable commitments. Set direction and protect engineer time, then shape growth theses from delivered outcomes to drive option years and expansions. Feed field insights back into product and engineering to improve the platform for all customers. Work day-to-day at customer sites, test events, and hackathons, typically domestic. Requires U.S. security clearance eligibility.
Required Qualifications
- 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: missile defense and the defense test-and-evaluation enterprise — layered, system-of-systems weapon development where digital simulation carries as much weight as live fire, and the world of open-air ranges, distributed test networks, and synthetic environments that every major system must pass through.
- 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.
- Eligibility to obtain and hold a U.S. security clearance, given the classified and controlled environments this role supports.
Desired Qualifications
- Highly desired: Experience in a forward deployed, deployment strategist, or field delivery role at a technology or defense company.
- A prior key personnel Program Manager designation on a DoD or NASA contract, or time inside a government program office, uniformed or civilian.
- Working familiarity with government contracting mechanics: deliverable cadences, milestone reviews, option years, and what a contracting officer cares about.
- A track record of converting delivery into growth: an option year exercised, an expansion won, a pilot that became a program of record.
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