Strategic Deployment Lead for Federal Programs

Istari Digital; United States; On-site; USD 140,000 - 220,000; Full time

Job summary

Istari Digital seeks a Deployment Strategist to own the outcome of customer programs end to end, embedding with forward deployed engineers on flagship programs or lighter engagements. You will decide what matters, coordinate demonstrations and tests, and drive the deployment so it becomes indispensable to the customer.

On large federal programs you will carry the formal Program Manager designation, work cross-functionally with the government program office, and be accountable for all

Qualifications

• Track record of owning an outcome with no formal authority over the people delivering it, and finding that energizing rather than alarming.
• Insider fluency in the following customer domain… the kind that comes from having lived it, along with a clear view of what is broken in how that world works today.
• Domain: air platform development and the lifecycle behind it — the research-to-transition pipeline for aerospace vehicles, autonomy, and propulsion; the acquisition, certification, and sustainment world that carries a weapon system from requirement to retirement; and the enterprise push to make digital engineering, model sharing, and digital threads real across all of it.
• Technical conversancy across modeling and simulation, MBSE, digital threads, software development, and/or agentic design: enough to interrogate an engineering claim and be credible doing it, not necessarily enough to build it yourself.
• Product sense, because this role sits closer to product management than to project management: knowing what to build next and what not to build at all, and telling the difference between a request that serves one user and a capability that belongs in the platform.
• The range to brief a program executive in the morning and pair with an engineer in the afternoon.
• An instinct for reading rooms and organizational dynamics, because adoption is won in the customer’s org chart as much as in the software.
• Comfort operating with incomplete information and shifting requirements, and the initiative to define next steps without being told.

Responsibilities

• Own the outcome of a program end to end: define what success means, choose the problems worth solving and the order to solve them in, and set what each milestone has to prove.
• Embed with government and industry customers to understand their mission, their constraints, and their politics, and build relationships from end users to program executives that make a deployment durable.
• Serve as named Program Manager on major federal programs: carry the program narrative through status reports, technical interchange meetings, and formal review boards, and stand accountable for every contract commitment.
• Set direction and priorities for a small Forward Deployed Engineering team without intermediating between engineers and users, and protect their time from everything that is not the work.
• Own the growth thesis: option years, follow-ons, and expansions grow out of delivered outcomes, and they are your responsibility to shape from inside the relationship.
• Feed what you learn in the field back into product and engineering, so the platform gets better for every customer, not just the one in front of you.
• Work day-to-day at or travel to customer sites, test events, hackathons, and program milestones as needed, typically domestic.

Skills

Judgment

Curiosity

Bias toward action

Domain knowledge

MBSE familiarity

Product sense

Executive briefing

Adaptability

Job description

Istari Digital seeks a Deployment Strategist to own the outcome of customer programs end to end, embedding with forward deployed engineers on flagship programs or lighter engagements. You will decide what matters, coordinate demonstrations and tests, and drive the deployment so it becomes indispensable to the customer.

On large federal programs you will carry the formal Program Manager designation, work cross-functionally with the government program office, and be accountable for all