Deployment Strategist (TS/SCI Clearance Required)
Early-stage defense AI company. Arlington, Virginia.
Location: Arlington, Virginia. On client site 80 to 100% of the time. Not eligible for remote or hybrid work.
Role type: Full-time employee, individual contributor.
Reports to: The lead for your engagement.
Compensation: $140,000 to $220,000 base, depending on experience, plus equity.
Travel: Periodic CONUS and OCONUS travel to supported units.
Clearance: U.S. citizenship and an active TS/SCI.
About the Client
We build the vendor neutral operating system for agentic AI in high consequence environments. In our first ten months we won four fully competed prime contracts across the U.S. Government, every one of them deploying into classified spaces. We are live on JWICS. We were selected from a field of 200+ companies for a defense innovation challenge and won it. We beat two established defense primes on the same program and earned the follow-on, now in execution.
About the Role
Deployment Strategists are the mission experts on our field teams. Our agentic harness is deployed in classified environments across the Intelligence Community and the Department of Defense, and your job is to make it produce work that meets mission standards. You map how analysts and operators actually work, capture institutional knowledge that has never been written down, and encode it into the platform as agents, workflows, and skills. You are the person accountable for whether the platform gets adopted.
This is a technical role. You will not own connectors or infrastructure, but you will build in the platform every day, configuring agents, building workflows, and scripting in Python, and you are expected to develop genuine depth in how AI agents are designed, prompted, and evaluated.
This role requires genuine domain expertise in the customer's mission space, earned by having done the work. You report to the lead for your engagement and work alongside the Forward Deployed Engineers on the same team.
This role is on client site 80 to 100% of the time in Arlington, Virginia. It is not eligible for remote or hybrid work.
How the Role Is Structured
We publish the time allocation because this role is more technical than the title suggests:
- About 50% building in the platform. Configuring agents, designing and evaluating workflows, and scripting in Python.
- About 30% analyst engagement. Workflow mapping, elicitation interviews with experienced analysts, and hands-on training and coaching.
- About 20% documentation and feedback. Reusable workflow documentation, and carrying analyst feedback on platform behavior back to product and engineering.
Responsibilities
- Mapping current analyst workflows before platform configuration begins.
- Tribal knowledge capture. You interview experienced analysts and operators to surface SOPs, undocumented practice, and exception to policy patterns.
- Encoding that knowledge into the platform as agents, workflows, and skills, owning whether the output is mission correct and not only technically valid.
- Agent quality. You apply prompt and workflow design, evaluation, and failure analysis to make agent output reliable.
- The partnership with your Forward Deployed Engineers, who own the connectors, integrations, and infrastructure your workflows depend on.
- Adoption. You drive it through hands-on training and coaching, and it is this role's primary metric.
- Analyst feedback on platform behavior. You are the main point of contact for it.
- Reusable workflow documentation that shortens every deployment after yours.
What This Role Is Not
- A pure training role. Training is one output. The core function is capturing mission knowledge and encoding it.
- A project management or customer success role.
- A generalist consulting role. Domain credibility is the basis of the position.
- A connector or infrastructure engineering role. You build in the platform and script in Python. Forward Deployed Engineers own production integrations and infrastructure.
- A lead or management role. You are an individual contributor on a small team, reporting to the engagement lead.
Requirements
Must-Haves
- 4+ years as an analyst, operator, or targeteer in the relevant mission space, with direct experience doing the work.
- Demonstrated ability to become a power user of complex analytic tooling and to teach it to experienced users.
- Working Python proficiency, including scripting and data wrangling, and comfort reading and modifying code.
- Practical understanding of AI agent concepts, including prompting, workflow and evaluation design, and where agents fail, or a clear track record of picking up new technical tooling fast.
- Strong interviewing and listening skills, with experience eliciting process knowledge from subject matter experts.
- Clear written communication.
- Willingness to work on client site 80 to 100% of the time in Arlington, Virginia, plus periodic CONUS and OCONUS travel to supported units.
- U.S. citizenship and an active TS/SCI clearance.
Nice-to-Haves
- Experience writing SOPs, tradecraft standards, or training curricula.
- Hands-on experience with AI assisted or agentic analytic tooling.
- Strong Python.
- An active professional network in the relevant analytic community.
- Experience supporting a J2 or joint or component intelligence staff, including JIPOE and the targeting cycle (Joint Targeting Cycle and F2T2EA).
- Experience across the intelligence cycle and all source fusion, from collection through finished production and targeting support.
- Experience with DoD and J2 intelligence tooling such as i2 Analyst's Notebook, MARS/MIDB, PROTON, ArcGIS Pro, TAC, FADE/MIST, VOLTRON, and OSINT platforms such as Babel Street, Maltego, Dataminr, or Recorded Future.
Compensation & Benefits
- Health, dental, and vision insurance. 99% of your premiums covered, and 100% of your dependents' premiums.
- Optional HSA plan. Lower premium, HSA eligible, fully portable, self directed or managed.
- Health Reimbursement Account for qualified healthcare expenses.
- Life insurance of $150,000 plus AD&D, 100% company paid.
- 401(k) with a 100% match on the first 6%, immediately vested. No cliff, no waiting period. Yours from day one.
- Wellhub Gold. Everything from Gold's Gym to Lifetime, fully covered, plus [solidcore], F45, and hundreds of other studios.
- Unlimited PTO. Real time off, not accrual based. Take what you need, no counting required.
- Every federal holiday, plus additional paid days off over the winter break.
- Supportive leave of absence program, including time off for military service, medical events, and parental leave.
- Breakfast, lunch, and endless snacks every day you are in the office.
- Pre-tax commuter benefits.
- Company phone plan. A new iPhone, fully company paid.
Why This Role
CIA officers, MIT engineers, Special Operations combat veterans, and applied AI engineers from frontier labs including Anthropic and Google. You will make decisions that immediately affect national security. You will own part of a company early and when it matters.