Forward Deployed Product Manager, Public Sector

The shape of it

In the posting’s own words

Scale is accelerating the development of AI across the world's most important organizations, including the U.S. Department of War (DoW), its constituent services, and the broader U.S. National Security industry. The Product Manager, Public Sector will lead Scale's product efforts across two connected focus areas — military planning and real-time AI and Alerting (LUX) — shaping real production outcomes and translating messy operational reality into high-signal input for the core platform.

What it asks for · 9

• 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:
• 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.
• Ability to shape a cross-cutting set of solutions across multiple stakeholders and use cases, rather than customer-specific solutions.
• Ability to travel, including to classified facilities.
• 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 military service or DoD/DoW civilian experience in an operations, planning, or acquisitions role.

What the job covers

• 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. You are the accountable PM 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, not requirements docs. This includes military planning workflows (e.g., the Joint Planning Process) and modeling/simulation requirements (e.g., AFSIM), as well as real customer workflows, latency/throughput constraints, and mission priorities for LUX.
• Build trusted advisory relationships with senior military leaders (flag/general officer and senior civilian equivalents), National Security customer stakeholders, and senior technical leads. Become the reliable escalation point on the Scale side before issues surface externally.
• Drive deployments from contract to production inside classified and operationally constrained environments — whether that means military planning workflows or LUX's low-latency, high-throughput, mission-critical data systems. You know what "production-ready" means inside DoW, and you close the gap.
• 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 through the right channel.
• Shape a cross-cutting set of solutions spanning multiple stakeholders, echelons, and use cases, rather than owning a single point deployment.
• Partner closely with Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) teams and Platform Capability teams so the account runs as a coordinated team, not a set of parallel workstreams.
• 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 that must collaborate despite differing needs — distinct from building for a single customer.
• Travel as required to customer sites, including classified facilities.

Tools and skills named

Words the posting leans on

• product18×
• customer12×
• data9×
• platform9×
• senior8×
• production7×
• real7×
• stakeholders7×
• classified6×
• e.g6×
• military planning6×
• engineer5×
• experience5×
• national security5×
• planning process5×
• solutions5×

Counted from the posting after the mission statement and the legal notices are set aside. The ones near the top are the ones a screener is looking for.

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