Deployment Strategist

Istari Digital•Washington, DC

8d•$140,000 - $220,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Istari Digital builds the connective tissue for defense acquisition. Our platform lets engineering models, simulations, and digital threads move securely across primes, suppliers, and government program offices, so a system can be tested, trusted, and fielded in months rather than years. We work at the center of some of the hardest problems in defense acquisition: getting the right model, to the right person, at the right classification, at the right time. We are a small, senior team, and every hire changes what the company can do next.

Requirements

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: naval engineering and defense supercomputing — high-fidelity modeling and simulation for ship design and qualification, run on classified high-performance computing, where the hard part is just not the physics but moving models, software, and results through authorization and across security boundaries
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.

Nice To Haves

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.
Eligibility to obtain and hold a U.S. security clearance, given the classified and controlled environments this role supports.

Responsibilities

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.
Serve as named Program Manager on major federal programs: carry the program narrative through status reports, technical interchange meetings, and formal review boards, and stand accountable for every contract commitment.
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, typically domestic.