Deployment Strategist

About Istari

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.

We are a small, senior team, and every hire changes what the company can do next.

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.

Some days that means a working session with a prime's chief engineer. 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.

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. Your hours go to the outcome and to what the program becomes next, not to the tracker.

You are not the primary builder here; 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. We are looking for people who would rather own the result than the process, and the more ownership you take, the more you will be given.

• 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.
• 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. Travel is typically domestic, though some customer engagements require international travel.

We hire for judgment, curiosity, and a bias toward action more than for a specific degree or years of experience. That said, people who do well in this role tend to share a few things:

• A 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: commercial space development at scale—launch vehicles, engines, and spacecraft moving from first flight to reflight and rate production inside a vertically integrated engineering organization, where requirements, simulation, and test evidence sprawl across tool chains and increasingly must be packaged as certification‑grade proof for government customers.

• Technical conversancy across modeling and simulation, MBSE, digital threads, software…