Forward Deployed Product Manager (Public Sector)

Join Scale, a leading AI company, as a Forward Deployed Product Manager for the Public Sector. In this role, you will lead product efforts in military planning and real-time AI and alerting, driving deployments to production and building trusted relationships with senior military and national security stakeholders. You will translate operational reality into high-signal product input for engineering and platform teams, and shape a cross-cutting set of solutions spanning multiple stakeholders and use cases.

• Lead Scale's product efforts across military planning and real-time AI and Alerting (LUX), shaping production outcomes and translating operational reality into high-signal input for the core platform.
• Own product outcomes for a cross-cutting portfolio of AI and data capabilities, driving deployments to production inside classified and operationally constrained environments.
• Build trusted advisory relationships with senior military leaders and National Security customer stakeholders, becoming the reliable escalation point on the Scale side before issues surface externally.
• Ability to shape a cross-cutting set of solutions across multiple stakeholders and use cases, rather than customer-specific solutions
• Real-time streaming data systems — event-driven architectures, low-latency pipelines, and high-throughput data processing — and how they behave in production
• Technical translation: bridges the gap between customer engineering/planning teams and Scale platform engineers; adds interpretation rather than simply relaying messages
• Strong judgment under pressure: makes good calls quickly with incomplete information, knows when to escalate vs. resolve, does not generate thrash
• Customer trust-building: earns and maintains trust with demanding senior military, civilian, and mission stakeholders over multi-quarter engagements; manages conflict without eroding the relationship
• Direct experience working with the U.S. Department of War (DoW) or the broader U.S. national security community
• Extreme ownership and follow-through: closes loops without reminders, drives outcomes across teams without formal authority, holds self and others to commitments
• Ability to travel, including to classified facilities
• 6+ years in product management, technical program management, or a customer-facing product ownership role, including experience operating at an L6 (senior/staff) level of scope and autonomy
• Product judgment in the field: translates customer reality into product direction, not just feature requests; can say no credibly and explain why
• Technical fluency sufficient to hold a real conversation with a platform engineer about architectural tradeoffs — not deep coding, but genuine comprehension of how systems work in production
• Domain fluency: working knowledge of the military planning process and modeling/simulation tools (e.g., Joint Planning Process, AFSIM), and/or the tradeoffs inherent to real-time, event-driven, high-throughput data architectures and their implications for AI agents — and how each shapes product decisions
• Working knowledge of at least one of the following, with an ability to speak credibly to the other:
• The military planning process (e.g., the Joint Planning Process) and modeling/simulation systems (e.g., AFSIM)
• Operating in ambiguity and constrained environments: creates structure where there is none; makes decisions with incomplete information inside classified settings; does not wait for fully defined requirements
• Demonstrated record of shipping AI or data products into large, constrained, classified, or highly regulated organizations — not pilots or proofs-of-concept. You can name the customer, the scale, the integration, and what production actually looked like
• Comfortable operating with senior military/civilian/mission stakeholders and senior engineers simultaneously; credible presence in high-stakes rooms on both sides
• Active TOP SECRET security clearance (TS/SCI eligibility preferred)
• Clear, precise communication: adjusts for audience (senior leader vs. engineer vs. PM); writes and speaks at the right level of detail; does not over- or under-explain
• Enterprise deployment ownership: has driven AI/ML or complex/real-time software products from contract to production at scale — including near-zero-to-one, with no real users yet — with real integration, real security constraints, and real change management
• 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