Product Specialist

Istari Digital builds the connective tissue for defense acquisition. Our platform lets engineering models, simulations, and digital threads move securely across primes, suppliers, and government program offices, so a system can be tested, trusted, and fielded in months rather than years. We work at the center of some of the hardest problems in defense acquisition: getting the right model, to the right person, at the right classification, at the right time. We are a small, senior team, and every hire changes what the company can do next.

Istari is a platform for sharing and working on engineering data in highly regulated, no-fail industries — where a mistake can cost a mission, an aircraft, or a life. Teams building spacecraft, hypersonic vehicles, and submarines use it to keep their models, simulations, and test results connected, so they can move fast and not break things.

We’re hiring a Product Specialist to be the connective tissue between our product and the people who use and sell it. This is an early-career role with an unusual amount of surface area: some days you’ll be interviewing customers about what’s working and what isn’t, other days you’ll be building a one-pager for the sales team, recording a demo of a feature that shipped last week, or turning a pile of feedback from customer-facing teams into something product can act on.

We’re not hiring for years of experience. We’re hiring for smarts and hustle — someone who learns fast, follows through on everything they pick up, and finds real energy in being useful across a lot of fronts at once. You’ll work directly with our Head of Product, and you’ll learn how product gets built at a company where the users are aerospace and defense engineers and the stakes are real.

Done well, this role is a launchpad. You’ll touch customer research, product marketing, sales enablement, and product management in your first year — and the more you take on, the more you’ll be given.

• Gather customer feedback: sit in on customer calls, run lightweight interviews, and watch how people actually use the product.
• Collect and organize feedback from customer-facing teams — sales, deployment, support — into clear themes the product team can act on, and close the loop so those teams know they were heard.
• Create sales collateral: one-pagers, demo scripts, feature explainers, and competitive snippets that help the sales team tell the product’s story well.
• Demo features to customers and internal teams — showing a systems engineer how a supplier working in NX and a prime working in CATIA can verify against each other on every revision — and keep our demo environments and materials current as the product evolves.
• Help the product team with whatever moves the mission: release notes, documentation checks, testing a new feature before it ships.

We hire for judgment, curiosity, and a bias toward action more than for a specific degree or years of experience. That said, people who do well in this role tend to share a few things:

• 0–3 years of work experience. New grads are welcome. What matters is evidence of hustle — a project you shipped, a club you ran, a job where you clearly did more than the description asked.
• Strong writing. Most of this job is turning messy input into clear output, and clear writing is how that happens.
• Genuine curiosity about how things work — the product, the customer’s world, why a deal closed or didn’t. You ask good questions and actually listen to the answers.
• Follow-through. When you pick something up, it gets done, and nobody has to check.
• Comfort with technology. You don’t need to code, but you’ll be demoing a technical product to engineers, and you should enjoy learning it deeply enough to do that well.
• Directness. When asked for your best guess, you give it — you don’t hedge.
Preferred, not required
• A portfolio of things you’ve made — writing, videos, a side project, anything that shows you can produce.
• Experience in a customer-facing role, even informally (support, tutoring, retail — anywhere you had to understand what someone needed).
• Exposure to engineering, aerospace, defense, or another technical domain.
• Must be a US citizen living within the United States.

You will work directly with the executives and engineers building the company, not through layers of process. You will get more exposure to how a product company actually works — customers, sales, engineering, strategy — in a year here than in three years somewhere with layers. This is a small team solving a problem that matters, and we are looking for people who want to build the next chapter of it with us.

We’ve built a team of what we call Wizards — people who bring depth in their domain and range across others, who are collaborative without being deferential, and who genuinely care about what we’re building. We celebrate individual contributions, give feedback early and often, and argue about ideas so we can execute together.

There’s no room here for hierarchy for its own sake, or for busywork that doesn’t move the mission. We are outcomes-driven, and we hold each other to a high standard — with genuine respect for each person’s expertise and wellbeing.

Focus is rewarded. Finish is remembered.

Facts are friendly. Even when they are not fun.

Fellowship is fundamental. Make others successful.

Originally posted on Himalayas