Forward Deployed Strategist (AI) (Washington DC-Baltimore Area)

Location: Washington, DC or San Francisco, CA (no other locations or fully remote options)

Compensation: $147,000–$185,000 base salary + equity, benefits, and incentive compensation

Employment Type: Full-Time | Individual Contributor

Travel: Up to 50%, including regular on-site customer engagement

About the Company

Our client is a venture-backed AI security company helping government and enterprise organizations deploy AI safely and securely. Its platform enables customers to evaluate AI models and applications, protect sensitive data, enforce runtime policies, govern AI agent behavior, and maintain the documentation needed for oversight and compliance.

The platform supports cloud, hybrid, on-premises, edge, and air-gapped environments. The company is now building out its dedicated public sector organization, offering an opportunity to help shape how its technology is deployed across government and national security environments.

About the Role

Our client is seeking a Senior Forward Deployed Strategist to help public sector customers translate mission requirements into practical AI security and deployment strategies.

This is a customer-facing role at the intersection of mission strategy, technical solutioning, AI assurance, and execution. You will work directly with government stakeholders, mission users, technical teams, systems integrators, and internal product and engineering teams to move AI initiatives from early discovery through pilots and initial deployment.

This is not a traditional sales or project management role. You'll combine strategic thinking, technical fluency, and hands-on customer engagement to shape use cases, guide evaluations, develop deployment plans, and help customers realize measurable mission value.

What You'll Do

• Develop deep expertise in the company's AI evaluation, runtime guardrail, and agent governance platform.
• Partner with public sector customers to identify high-impact use cases across AI evaluation, red-teaming, runtime controls, observability, and agentic systems.
• Translate mission requirements, policy considerations, technical constraints, and stakeholder priorities into deployment strategies, implementation plans, and measurable success criteria.
• Lead customer-facing demos, workshops, technical briefings, and pilot planning sessions for government executives, technical teams, mission users, and industry partners.
• Collaborate with product, engineering, and delivery teams to implement and operationalize solutions in complex customer environments.
• Serve as a subject-matter resource on AI assurance, helping customers understand and address risks related to models, applications, data, and AI agents.
• Support public sector growth through RFI/RFP responses, white papers, pilot proposals, partner strategies, and account expansion initiatives.
• Bring customer feedback and field insights back to product, engineering, research, and go-to-market teams to inform product development and deployment strategy.

What We're Looking For

• 5+ years of experience in public sector technology, defense tech, strategy consulting, technical program management, solutions, product strategy, enterprise SaaS, or a related customer-facing field.
• Experience supporting government customers across the Department of War, Intelligence Community, federal civilian agencies, or national security environments.
• Strong understanding of generative AI and LLM systems, including model evaluation, red-teaming, RAG and copilot architectures, prompt injection, guardrails, observability, and agentic workflows.
• Technical fluency across enterprise software, cloud infrastructure, APIs, AI/ML systems, cybersecurity, or software deployment architectures.
• Ability to translate complex customer needs into actionable use cases, solution strategies, implementation plans, success metrics, and executive-level presentations.
• Experience managing complex stakeholders and driving proposals, pilots, milestones, statements of work, or cross-functional delivery initiatives.
• Strong communication, presentation, writing, problem-solving, and decision-making skills.
• Ability to build credibility with government stakeholders, program offices, mission owners, technical evaluators, security teams, primes, and systems integrators.
• Willingness to travel regularly to customer sites, with travel reaching up to 50%.
• U.S. Citizenship and eligibility and willingness to obtain a U.S. security clearance.

Nice to Have

• Hands-on experience with AI evaluation, red-teaming, runtime guardrails, observability, or agent governance in production or customer-facing environments.
• Familiarity with RMF, FedRAMP, Impact Level (IL) environments, ATO processes, or CMMC.
• Understanding of public sector acquisition pathways, including BAAs, OTAs, SBIR/STTR, IDIQs, and production transition or programs of record.
• Experience working with systems integrators, defense primes, federal channel partners, or public sector resellers.
• Previous experience at a defense tech, AI, cybersecurity, cloud, or enterprise SaaS company.
• Background in military, intelligence, federal technology, or mission-oriented consulting.
• Active Secret, Top Secret, or TS/SCI clearance.