Federal Deployment Lead

Thread AI • New York, NY

2d • $150,000 - $230,000 • Onsite

About The Position

This is not a project management role, but a hybrid of strategic thinking, technical fluency, client partnership, and relentless ownership.
Own the full lifecycle: Walk into a federal agency, decompose their hardest problems, architect a path to production on Lemma, and drive it to completion - through compliance, politics, and technical uncertainty.
Navigate the federal landscape: Scope requirements with a federal CTO, map data flows across agency systems, prepare ATO materials, and anticipate where compliance will get stuck before it does.
Make sound technical calls: Design multi-tenant deployment architectures, pressure-test assumptions with engineering, and engage substantively on trade-offs between approaches.
Shape the practice: Help define how Thread AI approaches the federal market - the strategy, partnerships, delivery model, and hiring. This is a founding role.

Requirements

• First-principles thinker: You decompose complex, ambiguous problems into their load-bearing assumptions instinctively. You synthesize technical constraints, political dynamics, compliance requirements, and user behavior into a cohesive plan.
• Federal fluency: Navigated at least some of: FedRAMP, ATO packages, FISMA, NIST 800-53, IL4/IL5. etc. You don't need to be a compliance engineer, but you need to design delivery approaches that work within the landscape.
• Technical depth: You can read an architecture diagram and spot where it will break. You understand how APIs, data pipelines, orchestration engines, and AI/ML models fit together. Experience with AWS/GCP/Azure, multi-tenant architectures, or AI/ML deployment patterns is a strong plus.
• Delivery under real constraints: You've shipped something meaningful in production, not a demo. Federal, defense, or IC experience is ideal; heavily regulated domains (financial services, healthcare, energy) also count if the complexity was comparable.
• Ownership as identity: You see projects through from beginning to end. On a team of fewer than 30, there is nowhere to hide. That excites you.

Nice To Haves

• Active TS/SCI clearance, or an active Secret clearance with ability to obtain TS/SCI.
• Direct experience deploying AI/ML systems in federal or DoD environments.
• Familiarity with FedRAMP High or Moderate authorization processes from the vendor or agency side.
• Experience at a forward-deployed technology company operating in the federal space.
• Background in data engineering, systems integration, or platform architecture - enough to have opinions about how orchestration layers should work.
• Experience operating in early-stage environments (Series A/B) where you've had to build the playbook, not follow one.

Responsibilities

• Own the full lifecycle: Walk into a federal agency, decompose their hardest problems, architect a path to production on Lemma, and drive it to completion - through compliance, politics, and technical uncertainty.
• Navigate the federal landscape: Scope requirements with a federal CTO, map data flows across agency systems, prepare ATO materials, and anticipate where compliance will get stuck before it does.
• Make sound technical calls: Design multi-tenant deployment architectures, pressure-test assumptions with engineering, and engage substantively on trade-offs between approaches.
• Shape the practice: Help define how Thread AI approaches the federal market - the strategy, partnerships, delivery model, and hiring. This is a founding role.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed