Senior Forward Deployed Strategist

Halyard Collective; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Performance bonus

Long-term equity incentive

Medical, dental, and vision insurance

Job summary

Halyard Collective is seeking a Senior Forward Deployed Strategist to own end-to-end transformations across our portfolio of services companies in San Francisco. You will map operations, design production software, and drive EBITDA impact through AI-powered workflows, with equity upside and a performance bonus.

You will lead on-site work with office leaders, model the business as systems, and sequence initiatives for maximum value while delivering measurable results.

Qualifications

• 4–6 years shipping software that other people depend on.
• Hands-on experience building with LLMs — agents, evals, retrieval, structured extraction.
• Ability to read a P&L, size an opportunity, build the value case and defend it.
• Comfortable with messy real-world data: system exports, spreadsheets, PDFs and the accounting quirks of small businesses.
• Strong communication with non-technical operators, and the presence to present to a CEO or a board.
• Based in San Francisco, or able to travel frequently to San Francisco; willingness to travel regularly to portfolio company offices.
• Bachelor's degree required.

Responsibilities

• Go onsite and work alongside office leaders, property managers, leasing agents and accounting staff to understand how the work actually happens — not how the org chart says it does.
• Map each business as a system: where time goes, where data breaks, where handoffs fail, and which of those move revenue, margin or retention.
• Decide what gets built. The portfolio generates more ideas than we can ship, and sequencing them well is a core part of this role.
• Design, build and own production software end to end: data pipelines, integrations, internal tools and LLM-powered workflows. Working prototypes in days, production in weeks.
• Put AI to work where it earns its place — agentic workflows, document extraction, classification and automation across leasing, maintenance, accounting and owner communication — with the guardrails that work touching money and residents requires.
• Own adoption, not just delivery. Train office teams, refine the workflow based on what you observe, and stay until the new process holds.
• Tie every initiative to the numbers that drive EBITDA, and own the reporting that shows whether it worked.
• Support diligence on acquisition targets and own the business side of post-close integration, building the playbook that makes each one faster.

Skills

Shipping software

LLMs / agents

Business judgment

Communication

Bias to action

Bachelor's degree

Education

Bachelor's degree

Tools

LLMs

Job description

Halyard Collective is a private equity firm built on a simple observation: AI is transforming white-collar work, and the greatest value will accrue to the services firms being transformed, not the companies selling the software. So we own those companies. We acquire high-quality businesses in fragmented, lower-middle-market services industries and transform how their work gets done — as principals, not vendors. Rather than bolting point solutions onto a portfolio from the outside, we build at the bare metal, next to the people who do the work. Our founding team spans both halves of that equation: managing partners who invested at KKR, Sequoia, and Bain Capital, alongside senior engineering leadership built over 15 years at Google.

The Role

The Senior Forward Deployed Strategist decides what we build across the portfolio, then builds it. You own a portfolio company's transformation end to end: the operating diagnosis, the application build, the rollout, and the business result. A separate Senior Platform Engineer owns the infrastructure underneath you.

Our first platform is Galaxy, a property management group, so year one means maintenance, leasing, accounting and owner reporting, inside real offices with real operators. Unlike a startup's single bet, your equity upside is tied to a diversified portfolio of companies.

What You'll Own

• Go onsite and work alongside office leaders, property managers, leasing agents and accounting staff to understand how the work actually happens — not how the org chart says it does.
• Map each business as a system: where time goes, where data breaks, where handoffs fail, and which of those move revenue, margin or retention.
• Decide what gets built. The portfolio generates more ideas than we can ship, and sequencing them well is a core part of this role.
• Design, build and own production software end to end: data pipelines, integrations, internal tools and LLM-powered workflows. Working prototypes in days, production in weeks.
• Put AI to work where it earns its place — agentic workflows, document extraction, classification and automation across leasing, maintenance, accounting and owner communication — with the guardrails that work touching money and residents requires.
• Own adoption, not just delivery. Train office teams, refine the workflow based on what you observe, and stay until the new process holds.
• Tie every initiative to the numbers that drive EBITDA, and own the reporting that shows whether it worked.
• Support diligence on acquisition targets and own the business side of post-close integration, building the playbook that makes each one faster.

Qualifications

• 4–6 years shipping software that other people depend on, with a track record of owning outcomes rather than tickets. Startup, forward deployed, consulting-turned-builder and operator-engineer backgrounds all fit.
• Hands-on experience building with LLMs — agents, evals, retrieval, structured extraction — and a clear view of where they work and where they don't.
• Business judgment to match: able to read a P&L, size an opportunity, build the value case and defend it under scrutiny.
• Comfortable with messy real-world data: system exports, spreadsheets, PDFs and the accounting quirks of small businesses.
• Strong communication with non-technical operators, and the presence to present to a CEO or a board.
• Bias to action. No task is beneath you, including the last ten percent of a rollout.
• Based in San Francisco, or able to travel frequently to San Francisco; willingness to travel regularly to portfolio company offices.
• Bachelor's degree required.

Additional Information

• Base salary range: $200,000–$300,000, depending on experience, plus a performance bonus tied to systems shipped, adoption achieved and measurable EBITDA impact.
• Long-term equity incentive in Halyard and/or its platforms.
• Benefits include medical, dental, and vision insurance.