Deployment Strategist
On-siteMelbourne, Florida, United States
Job Summary
Own the end-to-end outcome of a customer program by defining success criteria, prioritizing problems to solve, and setting milestones that prove specific technical proofs. Embed with government and industry customers to understand mission constraints, build relationships from end users to executives, and serve as the named Program Manager on major federal programs, carrying the program narrative through status reports, technical interchanges, and formal review boards. Set direction and priorities for a small Forward Deployed Engineering team without intermediating between engineers and users, while protecting their time from non-work activities. Own the growth thesis by shaping option years, follow-ons, and expansions from inside the relationship, and feed field insights back into product and engineering to improve the platform for all customers. Work day-to-day at or travel to customer sites, test events, hackathons, and program milestones, typically domestic.
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: program execution inside a large, multi-site defense prime — mission systems moving through formal design gates where interface documents bind companies together, special-mission aircraft conversion and the certification evidence it demands at home and abroad, and defense production scaling under national urgency
- 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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