AI Deployment Lead

Brain Co.•San Francisco, CA

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

Brain Co. is seeking an AI Deployment Lead to manage critical government engagements from initial discovery through production adoption and expansion. This role involves building the team, developing operational playbooks, and establishing a cadence for multiple deployments without compromising quality. The company views deployments as the core engine for earning client trust and accelerating product learning, significantly influencing Brain Co.'s product, reputation, and growth. This is a player-coach position where the individual will lead 2-4 complex deployments while overseeing the broader portfolio as the team expands. The role operates at the intersection of deployment and product development, translating agency workflows into buildable AI solutions, coordinating cross-functional delivery, and converting field insights into reusable product capabilities. The role encompasses two main areas: ensuring a seamless client experience from sales handoff through adoption, renewal, and expansion, and leveraging deployments as a structured opportunity for product research and development by defining learning objectives and translating field evidence into product improvements.

Requirements

7+ years of experience leading complex, senior-stakeholder client programs—enterprise deployment leadership, AI / ML deployment, complex implementation, or program leadership at a high-growth software company, or comparable client-facing program leadership.
Demonstrated experience taking an AI/ML, data, or other complex technical product from ambiguous problem framing through production use and adoption.
Technical fluency in AI/ML and enterprise systems: you can map workflows and data, reason about integrations, evaluations, model behavior, security and production constraints, and pressure-test a delivery plan with engineers. You do not need to write production code.
A rigorous operating toolkit: structured problem-solving, hypothesis-driven workplans, synthesis under ambiguity, managing a team and a client at the same time, and the confidence to deliver hard messages early and constructively.
Demonstrated senior-client leadership—you’ve been the trusted day-to-day counterpart to executives and can build that trust quickly with elected officials, agency heads, and career public servants alike.
Product instinct: you can distinguish a configuration request from a product insight, and you’ve worked closely enough with product/engineering teams to speak their language and earn their trust.
Builder’s temperament: you’d rather create the playbook than inherit one, and you can hold high standards while shipping imperfect v1s of process.
Clear, decision-oriented communication across technical, operational, and executive audiences.
Comfort with 30–50% travel and genuine enthusiasm for working inside government buildings with the people who run them.

Nice To Haves

Public-sector delivery experience (govtech or civic tech).
Familiarity with government procurement, security reviews, and contracting norms.
Experience deploying AI/ML products.
Experience hiring and managing delivery teams.

Responsibilities

Lead 2–4 of Brain Co.’s most complex government deployments personally while overseeing the broader portfolio as the team grows.
Engage before close to de-risk delivery: shape scope, success criteria, stakeholder maps, resourcing, data and integration dependencies, acceptance criteria, and a workplan the customer’s executive sponsor has bought into before kickoff.
Translate agency workflows and desired outcomes into an MVP, technical requirements, sequencing decisions, and a delivery roadmap that Product and Engineering can execute.
Define a value case and learning agenda for each deployment and product line, including impact hypotheses, baselines, adoption measures, and success KPIs.
Run multi-workstream delivery with rigor: clear owners, milestones, dependencies, weekly operating cadence, crisp status synthesis, and early, honest escalation.
Protect the critical path by surfacing risks early, making clear scope/speed/quality trade-offs, and leading decision-ready executive readouts.
Drive adoption and change management, including stakeholder onboarding, training, operating-model changes, and sustained use after go-live.
Build durable relationships with mayors, city managers, CIOs, agency heads, program leaders, and frontline users, so issues surface early and Brain Co. becomes a trusted operating partner.
Turn field evidence into reusable product capabilities, evaluation patterns, playbooks, templates, and staffing models that shorten time to value on future deployments.
Run the deployment reviews and product-feedback cadence that converts customer signal into clear roadmap decisions.
Partner with sales team on renewal and expansion by translating proven deployment outcomes into the next highest-value use case, without losing scope discipline.
Navigate the security, procurement, legal, compliance, and systems-of-record constraints that come with public-sector deployments.
Hire, develop, and manage deployment leads as volume grows, setting the bar for what great looks like by doing it first.