Deployment Lead
Job Description
ENGAGEMENT LEAD | AI-NATIVE DATA MIGRATION & TRANSFORMATION
New York, NY | $175K–$225K + Bonus
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THE SHORT VERSION
The founders are running every customer engagement themselves right now, and it's the bottleneck — deals are signing faster than the team can staff them. This role takes that job over: sit with the customer, scope the problem, direct the engineers, own the outcome through go-live.
It's also the part of this business people get hooked on, because you're watching AI do real work inside real, operating companies — not a pilot, not a slide.
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WHAT THE COMPANY DOES
Private equity firms bring us into their portfolio companies to run value creation through data and AI. The portfolio company is the buyer; the PE sponsor is the channel that gets us in the door.
- Migration — ERP and CRM migrations, system consolidations. Work that normally goes to offshore teams for 18–24 months, done in weeks.
- Transformation — the unglamorous work before the AI mandate can actually run. Most companies stall because the underlying data was never made usable.
The hard part isn't moving data — it's deciding what it means and proving the final record is right. Ingestion, schema mapping, cited extraction, exception review, reconciliation, controlled writeback. Get it wrong and a customer gets billed for the wrong product, quote-to-cash breaks, a covenant trips. Get it right — every field cited back to source — and that's what customers are actually paying for.
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THE COMPANY, BRIEFLY
YC-backed. About a dozen people in New York, mostly engineers, all onshore, largely profitable. Going from $0 to $5M run-rate in six months.
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THE JOB, IN THREE PARTS
- Engagements (the core) — Run what's signed as engagement lead: scope with the stakeholders who own the systems, direct the engineers, make the calls that keep it moving, own it through go-live. Day one looks like this: a post-M&A migration just closed at a portfolio company — go run it with two engineers.
- Relationships — The work generates the next work. Whoever ran the last engagement is the most credible person in the next room. You'll sit in sponsor conversations, present readouts, and turn one portfolio company into three. No quota — commission is pure upside on anything you bring in.
- The practice (over time) — Every engagement shares common building blocks that haven't been productized yet. That becomes yours to own, along with hiring engagement leads under you as the customer base stacks up.
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WHO THIS IS FOR
3+ years at McKinsey, Bain, or BCG, or on a PE value-creation team — ideally a few years of consulting followed by a stretch inside PE — or you ran a function inside a portfolio company when the data was a mess.
- You can run an engagement and want to — ambiguous scope, a demanding customer, engineers who need clean decisions
- Operationally excellent — the deck is right, the model ties, the client hears back same-day
- You use AI aggressively, or you're determined to learn fast — 80/20 judgment over polish
- You've seen the path to partner and you'd rather own something instead
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If you're operationally strong, you can hold a room full of VPs, and you want to be on the frontier of how real companies adopt AI — this is that seat.
