Founding Deployment Strategist

Poka Labs; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 80,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

Poka Labs is seeking a dynamic implementation manager in San Francisco to bridge the gap between customers and engineering. This role involves understanding customer workflows, helping configure the product, and ensuring successful adoption. The ideal candidate will possess strong technical background, customer empathy, and 3-8 years of relevant experience. Responsibilities include monitoring performance logs and maintaining customer relationships. The position requires in-office work five days a week with up to 25% travel.

Qualifications

• 3-8 years in a technical customer-facing role such as consulting or solutions engineering.
• Willingness to dive into code as needed.
• Experience working with industrial customers and messy ERP data is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Understand customer workflows and work with engineering to configure the product.
• Perform basic data cleaning to get customers up and running.
• Monitor logs and resolve issues proactively.
• Meet with customers to assess progress and address concerns.

Skills

Technical background or experience with Claude Code

Customer empathy

Ability to explain technical concepts

Job description

About Poka Labs

Poka Labs builds AI agents that automate pricing, quoting, and cross-sell for complex manufacturing businesses. Specialty chemicals, pipe fittings, abrasives, advanced materials, adhesives, coatings, metals. Industries where technical specs drive pricing, catalogs run to 20,000+ SKUs, and the best account managers carry decades of tribal knowledge in their heads.

A typical quote at one of our prospects: customer emails an RFQ. The account manager/engineer decodes the product and configurations, checks inventory, factors in tariffs, freight, customer history, and competition, then gets internal approval. Weeks go by, multiple people, and customers get left in the dark.

Our AI agents run 24/7 doing this work. A week becomes five minutes. Win rates go up. Margin improves. Customers grow.

Deployed at F100 enterprises and mid-market manufacturers. Based in SF, growing fast.

About the Role

Part implementation manager, part customer success, and part product manager. We are looking for someone to bridge the gap between our customers and our engineering team, helping customers get the most out of the product as it is today and helping our engineering team learn what is needed from the product tomorrow.

You will work with our customers post sale to understand how our product fits into their existing workflow, mapping out how to integrate with their existing systems and data with our product. You will then own the initial customer relationship as they get going, helping them adopt and configure the product to meet their needs.

This role is based in San Francisco, in office, with occasional travel to meet with customers.

Job Requirements

• Deeply understand customers current workflows and work with our engineering team to configure our product.
• Basic data cleaning and organizing to get a customer up and running.
• Meet with customers on a regular cadence to understand what's going well and where we are following short.
• Monitor logs and other error signals to catch and resolve issues before our customers do.
• San Francisco in office 5 days a week.
• Travel up to 25% of the time.

Desired Qualifications

• Have a technical background or experience using Claude Code, with a willingness to dive into code as needed.
• 3-8 years in a technical customer-facing role (consulting, solutions engineering, implementation, or similar).
• You have strong customer empathy and an ability to explain highly technical concepts to a less technical audience.
• You're happy to pick up slack where needed. This role touches a ton of areas of the company and is likely to be very dynamic.

Nice to Have

• Experience working with industrial customers and messy ERP data.
• Experience using or building AI agents.