Founding Engagement Strategist & General Manager

Starbridge•New York, NY

18h•$125,000 - $200,000•Hybrid

About The Position

This is a founding seat at Starbridge. You'll own the relationship, scope, and outcomes for our first deep institutional engagement: a multi-year partnership with a major public higher education institution serving tens of thousands of students. You'll define what a successful Starbridge deployment looks like at this scale, then build the playbook the rest of the company runs on. You'll sit at the highest executive levels of the customer (system office, chancellor's office, unit heads, institutional research, IT) and translate their priorities into product scope. You'll be paired with a Founding Forward-Deployed Engineer who owns the code; you own the relationship, the scope, and the outcomes. Together you'll run a multi-million dollar P&L from day one.

Requirements

3+ years owning enterprise or institutional customer relationships, with at least one engagement of 18+ months where you were the primary commercial and strategic owner from kickoff through renewal or expansion.
Direct accountability for $1M+ in annual contract value or program budget you owned outcomes for, including authoring the success metrics yourself rather than inheriting them from sales or leadership.
Authorship of customer requirements docs, statements of work, or product roadmaps that engineering shipped against. You can point to specific decisions where you held the line on what was in or out of scope.
4 days a week onsite at our NYC office
Ability to travel to customer sites roughly once a week

Responsibilities

Own the customer relationship end to end — from the State to the Chancellor's office to the operational unit heads to the IT and institutional research teams
Sit at the highest levels of a massive customer and translate the priorities of executive leadership into product scope
Partner with a founding engineer to ship software that actually gets adopted, not just delivered
Define what success looks like, how we measure it, and how we get there
Build the playbook for how Starbridge embeds inside public agencies & institutions and help us scale this motion into a category-defining practice
Own the P&L from end-to-end