Deployment Strategist - Intel

Istari Digital builds the connective tissue for defense acquisition. Our platform lets engineering models, simulations, and digital threads move securely across primes, suppliers, and government program offices, so a system can be tested, trusted, and fielded in months rather than years. We work at the center of some of the hardest problems in defense acquisition: getting the right model, to the right person, at the right classification, at the right time.

A Deployment Strategist at Istari is the single accountable owner of a customer program's outcome. You will embed with a small team of forward deployed engineers on one flagship program, or a small set of lighter engagements, and you will decide what matters: which problems the team attacks and in what order, what each demonstration, technical interchange, or test event has to prove, and how the deployment becomes something the customer cannot imagine operating without. Other days it means briefing a program executive on why a digital thread changes their schedule risk, or reading the room after a review board and knowing exactly which conversation needs to happen next.

On our largest federal programs, you also carry the formal Program Manager designation as contract key personnel. You are the government program office's day-to-day peer, and your name is on every deliverable commitment we make. You will have support from a shared Program Operations team that helps to assemble reports, format deliverables, and work the submission machinery behind you - but you answer for all of it. we hire Forward Deployed Engineers for that, and your job is never to stand between them and the customer.

You do need enough technical range that engineers trust your judgment and customers trust your answers. There is no fixed path into this role and no single background that produces a great Deployment Strategist. 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. 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.

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.

Experience in a forward deployed, deployment strategist, or field delivery role at a technology or defense company. A prior key personnel Program Manager designation on a DoD or NASA contract, or time inside a government program office, uniformed or civilian. S. security clearance, given the classified and controlled environments this role supports.

You will work directly with the executives and engineers building the company, not through layers of process. You will see your work reach real programs and real missions quickly - the outcomes you own here end in test events and fielded systems, not slide decks - and you will have room to shape a role that does not yet have a fixed definition. In addition to base salary, this role may be eligible for bonuses, equity, and a comprehensive benefits package. #