Deployment Strategist

The mandate: Own enterprise voice AI deployments end to end — discovery through production launch — for customers like CVS/Aetna, American Airlines, and Lenovo. This is the Palantir Forward Deployed Engineer / Deployment Strategist archetype applied to voice AI: you sit with the customer, redesign their business process around the technology, build the thing, and own whether it works.

This is not a Customer Success role and should never be pitched as one. Recruiters who position this as "enterprise CSM at a hot AI company" will get the wrong candidates and waste the pipeline.

What You'll Own

• Full deployment lifecycle: discovery → requirements → scoping → build → production launch → optimization
• Conversational workflow design, automation strategy, and deployment architecture for enterprise accounts
• Prototypes and use-case validation — you build, not just spec
• ROI models and business cases that quantify AI automation impact and drive customer prioritization
• Executive relationships: trusted advisor to operational leaders and C-suite at Fortune 500 accounts
• Pre-sales partnership with Sales on scoping and customer presentations
• Cross-functional unblocking across Product, Engineering, and Customer Success
• Repeatable deployment playbooks and frameworks that let the motion scale past you

Requirements

Hard gates:

• On-site in the Bay Area. Not hybrid, not remote. No exceptions surfaced in the JD.
• Demonstrated customer-facing ownership of technical deployments — not advisory, not account management. They shipped something into production for a customer.
• Comfortable in technical conversations without being a full-time engineer. Must be able to prompt-engineer, prototype, and read an API doc.

Profile:

• 3–8 years in deployment, implementation, solutions consulting, forward deployed engineering, product management, or strategic consulting (experience band inferred from comp and scope — pending confirmation)
• Has written PRDs, implementation plans, requirements docs, or project specs
• Has built ROI analyses or value-based scoping models
• Has managed complex multi-stakeholder projects with competing priorities

Strong bonuses:

• Prior LLM prompting depth — this is called out explicitly as a subject-matter expectation
• Contact center, CX, CCaaS, or BPO domain knowledge (Five9, Genesys, NICE, Talkdesk, Twilio Flex)
• Prior experience at a company that sold into Fortune 500 with a deployment-led motion
• Voice/telephony infrastructure familiarity

Location and visa:

• On-site, Bay Area
• Visa sponsorship: Yes — H-1B, TN, L-1, E-3, F-1 (OPT/CPT). This is unusually open and is a real sourcing advantage. Lead with it.

Anti-patterns

• Pure relationship AMs and CSMs with no build history
• Enterprise implementation consultants from legacy on-prem vendors running 9–12 month deployment cycles — the pace mismatch is fatal here
• Sales engineers who only demo and hand off
• Big-company program managers who coordinate but have never owned an outcome
• Consultants who produce decks and recommendations rather than shipped systems
• Anyone who needs the problem defined for them — the JD says "creating structure where none exists" twice in different words

Who Will Thrive Here

Someone who has been the single throat to choke on an enterprise deployment and liked it. They can walk into a room with a VP of Customer Care who has 400 agents and a budget problem, map the workflow, build the prototype that week, and come back with a business case. They're allergic to ambiguity as an excuse and treat it as territory. They want the Palantir FDE job at a company growing 650% year-over-year with 50 people.