Forward Deployed Strategist
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Oct 12, 2026. First seen by Alion on Jul 23, 2026. Cursor scores A on the Alion truth index.
Our mission is to automate coding. The first step in our journey is to build the best tool for professional programmers, using a combination of inventive research, design, and engineering. Our organization is very flat, and our team is small and talent dense. We particularly like people who are truth-seeking, passionate, and creative. We enjoy spirited debate, crazy ideas, and shipping code.
About the role
We're looking for a Forward Deployed Strategist to own our most strategic customer engagements - from first workshop through delivery. You'll sit with executive sponsors, surface the highest-value use cases, turn them into tightly scoped projects, then stay accountable for the outcome, working with the FDE.
You'll typically work in a pod of one Strategist and 1-2 FDEs. You own the executive relationship and the shape of delivery; the FDE embeds with the customer's team and owns the deeper production builds. You'll stay hands-on at the configuration layer week to week, including workflows, integrations, and platform tooling, partnering with the FDE where the build is most complex. You will translate technical build into business outcomes and own the adoption of the build.
This is for someone who combines technical credibility in agentic coding and LLMs with the executive presence to earn trust in the boardroom, and the judgment to keep engagements scoped tight, delivered fast, and worth repeating.
What you’ll do
Scope
Partner with customer executive sponsors to scope FDE projects - translating ambiguous business problems into concrete, time-boxed deliverables with clear ROI
Lead technical discovery and architecture reviews, surfacing integration complexity and infrastructure constraints to validate that every engagement is technically feasible
Deliver
Work side by side with the FDE on the technical build - you own the configuration layer including workflows, settings, integrations, and platform tooling that don't require heavy custom code while the FDE owns the deeper production builds
Own technical enablement and adoption: run hands-on training, build playbooks and reference workflows, and coach the customer's team until they're self-sufficient. Adoption is measured by what their users do without you in the room
Monitor technical feasibility throughout delivery, adjusting scope with the sponsor when constraints emerge rather than letting engagements drift
Identify and scope expansion opportunities as they surface during delivery, in partnership with the account team
Escalate product gaps, integration friction, and recurring customer pain back to Product and Engineering with enough specificity to drive roadmap decisions
Build reusable playbooks that make the broader FDE org more capable over time
Own the executive relationship
Establish and maintain the executive relationship on your engagements, serving as the primary point of contact from kickoff through handoff
Sell the vision and the plan to C-suite stakeholders who need to believe in both the outcome and the team delivering it
Translate between business outcomes and technical implementation in both directions - for the sponsor and for the build team
You may be a fit if
You've spent 6+ years in Solutions Architecture, Deployment Strategy, technical consulting, or an Engagement Manager seat where you owned scoping and delivery with a technical team in AI-production workflows
You understand agentic coding and LLMs well enough to hold your own with senior eng: how they behave in production, where they fail, and what a resilient workflow looks like (you don't need to be the person writing the production code)
You're comfortable hands-on with Cursor workflows, integrations, and platform config, and can read enough Python / JS-TS to partner with an FDE
You've shipped AI-native workflows past the prototype stage and can tell a real production constraint from a nice-to-have
You can walk into an unfamiliar enterprise eng org, find the highest-leverage intervention fast, and scope something that delivers concrete value in weeks, not quarters
You have the executive presence to own the C-suite relationship and the technical credibility to earn trust with their eng leads
Domain depth in FSI, insurance, telecom, high-tech, healthcare/life sciences, or semiconductor is a strong plus