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.
The role
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.
Core 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.
- 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.
Qualifications / Who thrives in this role
- A track record of owning an outcome with no formal authority over the people delivering it.
- Insider fluency in allied military aircraft development—including multinational teams, disconnected MBSE and PLM toolchains, and engineering data.
- Technical conversancy across modeling and simulation, MBSE, digital threads, software development, and/or agentic design.
- Product sense, knowing what to build next and what not to build at all.
- 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.
Preferred, not required
- Experience in a forward deployed, deployment strategist, or field delivery role at a technology or defense company.
- A track record of converting delivery into growth.
- Eligibility to obtain and hold a U.S. security clearance.