Deployment Operations Lead

Risely; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 125,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Founding-level equity

Job summary

Risely in San Francisco is seeking a senior Deployment Lead to own customer deployments from discovery through launch and adoption. You will work with university leaders, operators, and technical teams to translate goals into deployment plans and ensure successful execution.

This is an individual contributor role with high visibility, helping shape Risely's delivery practices as we scale and expand our customer base.

Qualifications

• 3–5+ years leading complex software deployments or technical delivery.
• Clear communication with senior executives and cross-functional teams.
• Ability to translate goals into requirements, mappings and plans.
• Experience moving deployments from kickoff to launch and adoption.

Responsibilities

• Lead discovery with stakeholders to understand goals, data and constraints.
• Translate needs into deployment plans, data mappings and acceptance criteria.
• Own deployments from kickoff through validation, launch and activation.
• Be the trusted customer point of contact and drive decisions.
• Prepare teams for launch and drive adoption of Risely.
• Turn deployment lessons into scalable playbooks and feedback.

Skills

Customer deployment

Cross-functional delivery

Executive communication

Technical fluency

Structured problem solving

Job description

Downtown SF 4-5 days in office customer travel $125-150K founding-level equity

You will own how Risely is deployed for each customer, from technical discovery through launch and adoption. You'll work directly with university leaders, operators, and technical teams to understand the institution's goals, workflows, data, systems, and constraints; define the deployment requirements and technical decisions; and drive implementation alongside product and engineering.

The role

You will own the customer deployment, ensuring that the work is well-defined, decisions are made, risks are surfaced, and the institution reaches a successful launch and sustained adoption.

This role requires exceptional customer presence, strong operational judgment, and enough technical fluency to move from an executive conversation to a detailed workflow or data discussion.

This is a senior individual contributor role for someone who wants to stay close to the work: leading customer conversations, writing requirements, resolving blockers, and driving each deployment forward. As our first dedicated deployment hire, you will also help establish the practices and systems Risely uses to deliver customers as we grow.

What you will own

• Lead discovery with university executives, administrators, technical teams, and end users to understand each institution's goals, workflows, data, systems, and constraints.
• Translate customer needs into clear requirements, data mappings, deployment plans, and acceptance criteria that product and engineering can act on.
• Own deployments from kickoff through implementation, validation, launch, and activation, keeping milestones, decisions, risks, owners, and next steps clear.
• Serve as the trusted customer point of contact, setting expectations, resolving ambiguity, driving decisions, and escalating when needed.
• Prepare customer teams for launch, diagnose adoption challenges, and help users incorporate Risely into their day-to-day work.
• Turn lessons across deployments into stronger playbooks, product feedback, and scalable delivery practices, using AI and modern tools to increase your leverage.

Who you are

Risely is an AI-native company. We invest heavily in internal agents, automations, and processes that increase the speed, quality, and leverage of our work. For this role, AI fluency means understanding, building, troubleshooting, and improving agentic workflows - not simply using a general-purpose chatbot.

• You bring 3-5+ years of experience leading complex software implementations, technical deployments, or similarly cross-functional customer delivery work.
• You communicate clearly, listen carefully, and build credibility with senior executives and working teams. You move beyond the initial request to understand what a customer is trying to accomplish.
• You are comfortable reasoning about data, integrations, workflows, system behavior, and product constraints. You can work credibly with engineers and ask strong technical questions.
• You create structure, set priorities, and drive work to completion when information is incomplete.
• You understand how agents work: how instructions, context, tools, data, permissions, and feedback shape their behavior. You can investigate unexpected results, identify likely failure modes, and improve reliability.
• You have built or configured agents and automations of your own, and you can turn a repeatable workflow into a thoughtful process that combines automation with human judgment.
• You want to stay close to the work, from leading the executive meeting to investigating workflows, writing specifications, tracking decisions, and chasing the follow-up.

What you have done

• Led complex enterprise software deployments from discovery through go-live and adoption, with direct ownership of outcomes, dependencies, risks, and stakeholder expectations.
• Run discovery across executive, operational, user, and technical teams, then translated workflows, data, systems, and constraints into requirements, mappings, specifications, and acceptance criteria.
• Worked closely with engineers to resolve ambiguity, evaluate tradeoffs, and move technical work from definition through validation.
• Diagnosed deployment or adoption problems, identified their root causes, and driven the work required to resolve them.
• Recognized patterns across customers and turned them into better processes, reusable artifacts, or product recommendations.

Your previous title may have been in solutions consulting, implementation, technical delivery, product operations, professional services, or customer success. We care more about the work and judgment you developed than the title you held.

What success looks like

• Customers feel understood, confident in the deployment, and prepared to use Risely successfully.
• Product and engineering receive clear requirements and durable customer context they can act on.
• Deployment decisions, owners, risks, and next steps remain clear, and blockers are addressed early.
• Insights from each deployment improve Risely's product and the way we deliver future customers.

Why this role now

Universities bring distinct workflows, data, systems, and stakeholders. You will shape how Risely is deployed in each environment and turn what you learn into stronger delivery practices as we scale.

About Risely

Risely is building the agentic operating system for universities. Our platform helps institutions transform how they engage students, coordinate work, and operate at scale.

In our first year, we went live with nine new accounts across three product lines, including multiple R1 public universities and a growing group of small-to-medium institutions. Our customers have achieved outcomes including 32x greater outreach volume. At one university alone, Risely has returned an estimated 4,585 hours of staff capacity, equivalent to more than two years of full-time work. We are growing quickly, and successful deployment is central to delivering on the promise of our platform.

Risely is unable to sponsor work visas at this time. Applicants must be authorized to work in the U.S.