Forward Deployed Mission Strategist, Navy

Sitreps•San Diego, CA

1d•Onsite

About The Position

The Forward Deployed Mission Strategist is an on-site role embedded with Navy users in San Diego, where the company’s software is already in use. Most of the week is spent at user sites and on government networks, working alongside sailors and civilians to identify high-value operational problems and validate solutions in the product. The work includes configuring AI agent workflows, prompts, databases, reports, and alerts on a classified platform, then refining them with users until they are dependable in live operations. The strategist also scopes and delivers new capabilities with the engineering team and commonly leads funded prototypes from discovery through delivery. This includes operator discovery, sprint planning, building and testing on classified systems, demonstrations for program leadership, and shaping subsequent work. The role involves close collaboration with Mission Leads, who manage customer relationships and the path to a program of record, as well as platform engineers. It is a hands-on, evolving role with ownership over where to focus.

Requirements

U.S. Person status and an active Secret clearance at minimum; TS/SCI is preferred.
Live in the San Diego area or be open to relocating there; the role is on site.
Background applying technology to difficult operational challenges, such as product management, engineering, or bringing new technology into military service.
Ability to make sense of open-ended problems and develop clear hypotheses when there is no established path.
Comfort with hands-on technical work, including iterating on prompts and troubleshooting configurations.
Genuine interest in agentic AI and applying it to practical problems.
Strong ownership and ability to work independently.
Crisp writing and the ability to work comfortably with operators and senior officers.

Nice To Haves

Navy background, particularly in ISR, targeting, maritime operations, or unmanned systems.
Experience standing watch or working in an operations center.
Hands-on experience with LLM tools or basic scripting.

Responsibilities

Spend time with sailors and civilians in operations centers, training commands, and fleet exercises to understand their day-to-day work and identify manual effort.
Frame open-ended problems as quick experiments, evaluate results, and adjust direction as needed.
Build and refine prompts, AI agent workflows, data stores, reports, and dashboards, and verify that they work for users performing real tasks.
Check new releases on classified systems, identify failures, and provide engineers with clear, repeatable bug reports.
Lead funded prototypes from initial discovery through closing demonstrations, including sprint plans, government dependencies, and progress updates.
Develop rapid demonstrations and concepts to show new user groups what the software can do.
Work with Mission Leads and the business development team on scope, pricing estimates, and subsequent phases of work.