Forward Deployed Product Manager, Public Sector

What You'll Do

• Own product outcomes across Scale's military planning portfolio and/or its highest-impact national security accounts for LUX, spanning multiple DoW and National Security stakeholders and use cases. Accountable for product delivery and customer value.
• Translate operational reality into high-signal product input for engineering and platform teams — specific, evidence-backed product perspective with tradeoffs articulated.
• Build trusted advisory relationships with senior military leaders, National Security customer stakeholders, and senior technical leads. Serve as the reliable escalation point.
• Drive deployments from contract to production inside classified and operationally constrained environments.
• Distinguish where the product is the constraint from where execution, integration, policy, or change management is the constraint. Drive each type of blocker to resolution.
• Shape a cross-cutting set of solutions spanning multiple stakeholders, echelons, and use cases.
• Partner closely with Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) teams and Platform Capability teams.
• Identify and develop expansion opportunities grounded in demonstrated customer value.
• Represent customer reality to the platform and leadership with enough credibility that it changes decisions.
• Balance competing requirements across CCMDs and service components.
• Travel as required to customer sites, including classified facilities.

What We're Looking For

Core Competencies

• Enterprise deployment ownership: driven AI/ML or complex/real-time software products from contract to production at scale, including near-zero-to-one, with real integration, security constraints, and change management.
• Domain fluency: working knowledge of the military planning process and modeling/simulation tools (e.g., Joint Planning Process, AFSIM), and/or tradeoffs in real-time, event-driven, high-throughput data architectures and their implications for AI agents.
• Product judgment in the field: translates customer reality into product direction, not just feature requests; can say no credibly.
• Customer trust-building: earns and maintains trust with demanding senior military, civilian, and mission stakeholders.
• Technical translation: bridges the gap between customer engineering/planning teams and Scale platform engineers.
• Operating in ambiguity and constrained environments: creates structure where there is none; makes decisions with incomplete information inside classified settings.
• Clear, precise communication: adjusts for audience.

Must-Have

• Active TOP SECRET security clearance (TS/SCI eligibility preferred).
• 6+ years in product management, technical program management, or a customer-facing product ownership role, including experience operating at an L6 (senior/staff) level.
• Direct experience working with the U.S. Department of War (DoW) or the broader U.S. national security community.
• Working knowledge of at least one of: military planning process (e.g., Joint Planning Process) and modeling/simulation systems (e.g., AFSIM); or real-time streaming data systems — event-driven architectures, low-latency pipelines, and high-throughput data processing.
• Demonstrated record of shipping AI or data products into large, constrained, classified, or highly regulated organizations — not pilots or proofs-of-concept.
• Extreme ownership and follow-through.
• Comfortable operating with senior military/civilian/mission stakeholders and senior engineers simultaneously.
• Strong judgment under pressure.
• Technical fluency sufficient to hold a real conversation with a platform engineer about architectural tradeoffs.
• Ability to shape a cross-cutting set of solutions across multiple stakeholders and use cases.
• Ability to travel, including to classified facilities.

Nice-To-Have

• Direct experience with AI/ML platform products — agentic capabilities, human-agent interaction, large-scale data, some T&E; or data labeling, RLHF, fine-tuning workflows, and model evaluation pipelines.
• Hands-on familiarity with streaming technologies (e.g., Kafka, Flink, Kinesis) or the operational systems that consume them.
• Experience in a startup or early-stage environment where process didn't exist and had to be created.
• Prior forward-deployed or embedded role (consulting, field PM, solutions engineering with ownership).
• Prior military service or DoD/DoW civilian experience in an operations, planning, or acquisitions role.