Deployment Strategist

About the role

The Deployment Strategist is the on-site product detective. You live inside one of our strategic customer accounts — alongside a Forward Deployed Engineer and under an Engagement Manager — with one job: figure out what the customer actually needs, and make sure we deliver it.

This role is modelled on Palantir’s Echo — a function the industry has spent a decade trying to recreate. You are part product manager, part management consultant, part industry analyst. You translate a messy, human, operational reality into a clear problem statement. Then you work with your FDE partner to ship the solution that solves it.

If you were an Engagement Manager at MBB who genuinely loved the operations floor more than the deck; if you ran a supply chain function and now want to build the product rather than buy it; if you are an ex-founder who wants the agency of a startup with the leverage of a platform — this is the role for us to have a serious conversation about.

Key responsibilities

• Frame the problem. Diagnose the customer’s operational reality. Map current state, identify the highest-leverage opportunities, and build a sequenced transformation roadmap with measurable milestones.
• Run the Bootcamps, Diagnostics, and POCs. Before a deal closes, you are in the customer’s office running the diagnostic that scopes the work. The team that will deliver is the team that scopes.
• Own the day-to-day customer relationship. From the operations supervisor up to the business unit head. You are the Shipsy face inside the account alongside your Engagement Manager.
• Co-scope with your FDE. The FDE builds; you frame. You translate customer intent into clear solution requirements and AI workflow designs. You debate architecture. You sit in the same room.
• Drive adoption. Change management is part of the role. Training, workshops, executive briefings, operational rollout — the solution working is not enough; the customer using it is the metric.
• Translate field into product. Every customer insight you generate feeds the platform. Participate in the monthly Gravel Road → Paved Highway review. Your pattern becomes somebody else’s paved road.
• Be the industry voice. Build domain depth in your assigned vertical (logistics, transport, FMCG, retail). Become the person inside Shipsy whom colleagues call when they have a question about that industry.

Candidate profile

• Top-tier consulting background preferred. Senior Associate to Engagement Manager at MBB (McKinsey, BCG, Bain) or a Big-4 strategy arm (Strategy&, Monitor, Parthenon, EY-Parthenon), with a track record of ownership on multi-month client engagements.
• Or: equivalent ownership track. Ex-founder, ex-Chief of Staff, ex-strategy-at-a-scale-up, or BU owner inside a logistics / transport / supply chain company — anyone who has framed an ambiguous problem and shipped an outcome.
• Domain depth. Logistics, transport, supply chain, retail operations, or adjacent enterprise operations experience is a significant advantage. If you do not have it, you can demonstrate fast ramp-up on technical and operational domains.
• Structured problem-solving. First-principles thinker. Comfortable with ambiguity. You structure what others find chaotic.
• AI-native working style. Active, hands-on use of AI tools — Claude / GPT / agent frameworks, working with APIs, building workflows with modern AI-native tooling. We will ask you to show us what you have built.
• Technical partner competence. You do not need to code full stack, but you can read an API spec, reason about a data pipeline, and have a substantive debate about how an agent should be structured.
• Executive presence plus operational grit. Credible in a CXO conversation. Comfortable on an operations floor at dawn. Both, not either.
• Tier-1 education. IIT / NIT / BITS / equivalent, or top-tier international institution.

Organisational context

You sit inside a pod — typically one Deployment Strategist, one or two Forward Deployed Engineers, and a Support & Training lead — led by an Engagement Manager who owns the customer outcome. You report to the Engagement Manager on your account, with a dotted line into the regional Senior Director, Customer Solutions for career development.

Travel is significant — expect 40 to 60 per cent of your time on-site with your customer. For the rest, you are in Shipsy’s regional office with the other DSs in your region, swapping patterns and stress-testing each other’s roadmaps.

The progression is direct: strong DSs move into Engagement Manager roles within 18 to 30 months. This is the training ground for Shipsy’s partner-track leadership.

About Shipsy

Shipsy is the AI-native System of Action for logistics — the operating layer behind some of the largest enterprise supply chains on earth.

Where we are going. Enterprise logistics still runs on spreadsheets, ERPs from the 1990s, and tribal knowledge. We are replacing all of that with an AI-native operating layer — one where intelligent agents plan, dispatch, settle, and resolve at global scale. Logistics is a multi-trillion-dollar industry that has not yet had its software revolution. We are building it.

The scale today: - 275+ enterprise customers across 30+ countries - 5 billion+ shipments processed annually - 240+ carrier integrations - 7 global offices — Gurugram · Bengaluru · Dubai · Riyadh · Sydney · Amsterdam · Singapore - 300+ team members

Who we run: Aramex (65 countries, 18,000+ drivers, $27M annual savings delivered) · Heineken (2M+ trips across 70+ countries) · LATAM Cargo (Latin America’s largest airline group, $12B+ annual revenue) · Qatar Post (powers mail to 200+ countries) · Post Luxembourg (50%+ market share, $5M+/year savings) · Teleport (80% of Southeast Asia’s air-logistics network) · plus Australia Post, DPD, Smiths News, Apollo Pharmacy, argenx, Flipkart Minutes, Swiggy Instamart, and hundreds more.

Backed by $35M+ in venture capital from Peak XV Partners, A91 Partners, Info Edge, and others. Featured in the Gartner Magic Quadrant. SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, and GDPR compliant. 99.7% uptime SLA.

Trajectory. 50x revenue growth since 2020. Building toward $100M ARR and a public listing.

We are still a startup. Our real scale-up began in 2020 — and we have grown 50x since. Early enough that every senior hire shapes the next decade of the business. You are not joining a steady-state organisation with everything figured out. You will build the playbook, staff the pod, and own the outcome — with the speed and agency of a startup and the scale of customers most startups never touch.

The Deployment Strategist function is one of the two most critical new functions we are building. If you have spent your career learning how large, complex operating organisations work — and you now want to use that knowledge to ship AI that actually runs them — this is the seat.