Deployment Strategist: MBB or Startup Ops, Customer Deployments & AI Fluency | San Francisco (On-site, 25-75% Travel) | Up to $200K + Equity

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it." – Alan Kay

Some people invent the future in a lab. This one gets invented on factory floors, in engineering bays, and in rooms full of people who have been using the same design software since the nineties and are quietly desperate for something better.

If you want a front-row seat to that — and the chance to own the customer relationships that make it real — keep reading.

The short version

A Series A, venture-backed AI company in San Francisco is building foundation models with genuine spatial understanding: AI that can actually design and engineer physical things, not just talk about them. Think the industrial and engineering world finally getting the kind of tooling software engineers have had for a decade.

They've just raised, they're about ten people, and they are stepping into their first real go-to-market motion. That's the bit worth paying attention to. You only get to do a company's first GTM once.

They're hiring a Deployment Strategist to own and grow the customer relationships that come out of it.

Salary: $150,000 – $200,000 base, plus competitive equity. Top of band is genuinely available for the right person, and they're open to visa transfers and new sponsorship.

What you'd actually be doing

This is not a desk job with a CRM and a forecast meeting. It's a travelling, customer-facing, hands-in-the-machine role.

Get on site. You'll be at customer locations 25–75% of the time — often every other week — building relationships with the engineers and operators actually using the product, and finding out what's working and what isn't.

Grow the accounts. Renewals, expansions, and nudging promising prospects toward signing. These are large industrial and engineering customers, and the team expects seven-figure contracts. The accounts you own will be material to the company.

Close the loop with engineering. You'll turn messy, real-world customer feedback into clear, specific asks for product and engineering — then go back and tell the customer what changed. That round trip is the whole job.

Debrief in SF. Between trips you're back in the office with GTM, sales, product and engineering, working shoulder to shoulder with the CEO on a commercial motion that's being built from scratch.

Reporting line is straight into the CEO's GTM orbit. There is no layer of management to hide behind, which is either the best or worst news you'll read today depending on who you are.

Who this is built for

The hiring team has two clear archetypes in mind, and you only need to be one of them.

Archetype A — the consultant who wants to build something.You're at McKinsey, Bain or BCG. You're good at it. You're also starting to notice that the deck gets delivered and then you leave. You want to be the person who stays, ships, and sees whether it worked.

Archetype B — the startup operator who's already lived it.You've been customer-facing at a VC-backed startup (Series A through D) and owned a deployment or an account end to end. You know what it's like to be the only person standing between a frustrated customer and an engineering roadmap.

Beyond that, here's what they're calibrating against:

2–5 years in a deployment strategist, customer-facing, or consulting role. Palantir FDE and deployment backgrounds are a priority target here.

A bachelor's degree from a top-25 school.

Real AI fluency. Not "I've used ChatGPT." They want people who build — agents, scripts, workflows, Claude, Cursor. You'll be selling AI to engineers; you need to be fluent in it yourself.

Communication that holds up in a room. Tactful, well-spoken, able to build a relationship with a sceptical principal engineer and then translate what they said into something product can act on.

Genuine willingness to travel. This is a knockout question, so be honest with yourself about it before you apply.

On-site in San Francisco, five days a week when you're not on the road. No remote option — the team is small and wants everyone in the room.

Mechanical engineering or manufacturing exposure is a nice-to-have, not a requirement. Nobody's expecting you to arrive knowing CAD.

Two things that will count against you: a pattern of job hopping (or under 18 months at your current company), and a background that's purely internal — biz ops, internal tooling, no direct customer-facing on-site work. They've tested both and it hasn't worked.

Why now is the interesting part

AI for the physical world. This isn't another chat wrapper. It's foundation models aimed at how things actually get designed and built.

First GTM motion. The commercial playbook doesn't exist yet. You'd be one of the people writing it.

Big ownership, fast. Small SF team, direct line to the CEO. Deliver and the scope in front of you is enormous.

High-value deals. Seven-figure contracts with serious industrial customers — the kind of logos that reshape a CV.

The process

Four rounds, run quickly: two 20-minute intro calls, an on-site, and a follow-up. Interviews are behavioural and focused on your actual customer work — what you owned, what you fixed, what motivates you. References required.

Interested?

I'm handling this one directly and I'm happy to talk it through properly before anything goes anywhere — including the bits that might not suit you. If you're in the ballpark and the travel doesn't scare you, get in touch.

Keiran Hathorn — Big Wave [email protected]