Founding AI Deployment Strategist

About Forgepoint

Revitalize an industry. Rebuild America’s manufacturing backbone.

America’s $3 trillion manufacturing base is one of the most powerful forces in the world. It’s also one of the most overlooked when it comes to software.

Walk into any factory office in America and you’ll see it: estimators toggling between ten spreadsheets, procurement managers forwarding PDFs, and accountants retyping invoices by hand. The machines on the shop floor are state-of-the-art, but the computers in the office are running on excel, email, and prayers.

Our co-founder Jack saw it firsthand at Northrop Grumman, at Bain & Co, and at the dozens of aerospace manufacturers that he’s purchased from. Behind every great American product is a mountain of manual work that bottlenecks production and holds back growth.

This inefficiency doesn’t just slow the manufacturer down. It slows down our entire economy. It means fewer products get built and longer lead times for the ones that do. Worst of all: even customers who want to buy American often have no choice but to buy from overseas competitors who can move faster.

But now, for the first time, there’s a way to fix it.

At Forgepoint, we’re building AI workers that automate the manufacturing back office. Our AI workers handle critical but time consuming jobs like quoting, purchasing, invoicing, and sales coordination. Our AI workers eliminate the bottlenecks that have held manufacturers back for decades, turning processes that once took weeks into minutes.

This is about more than software. It’s about revitalizing the infrastructure that builds everything else. It’s about equipping US manufacturers with the best software in the world so they can focus on what they do best: making great products.

We’re backed by top-tier investors like a16z speedrun, and angels from Brex, Xwing, and Betterment, and already have more customer demand than we can serve.

The market is vast, the mission is urgent, and the opportunity is generational.

Join us as we rebuild the digital foundation of American manufacturing — and create a billion-dollar company in the process.

Our Values

• Go Big — Set goals that make us uncomfortable and to fundamentally change the industry.

• Serve the Builders — Put manufacturers first. We exist to help them thrive.

• AI First, End to End — Treat AI as the default interface for everything. Thread it through every workflow for us and our customers.

• Play the Long Game — Make choices that compound. Optimize for durability, trust, and resilience with our customers, our partners, and our team.

• Learn Loud and Fast — Seek feedback, iterate quickly, and turn setbacks into forward motion.

• Urgent and Excellent — Move fast without breaking craft. Balance pace with quality and sustainability.

The Role: AI Deployment Strategist

This is a client-facing deployment and strategy role that sits at the intersection of consulting, product, and operations. You will be the on-site lead responsible for transforming our customers' operations from manual processes to fully automated, AI-powered workflows.

You’ll work shoulder-to-shoulder with CEOs, COOs, and Plant Managers to map how their work gets done today, then you’ll design how our AI workers should behave inside those workflows, configure them, and launch them. Ultimately, you will build and lead our Deployment organization.

You will:

• Lead on‑site discovery and process mapping after contract signature

• Sit with sales, quoting, purchasing, order entry, and finance teams to document current workflows

• Identify bottlenecks, handoffs, and edge cases across quote‑to‑cash

• Define measurable success criteria with customer sponsors

• Design agent behaviors and operating playbooks

• Translate business rules into agent tasks, guardrails, approvals, and handoffs

• Specify data inputs / outputs, exception paths, and quality controls

• Propose phased rollouts that de‑risk adoption and show fast wins

• Configure and launch agents

• Configure agents, connect data sources, and set up approval paths and notifications

• Run pilots, collect feedback, and iterate quickly with users

• Coordinate change management, training, and go‑live readiness

• Prove value and systematize

• Instrument outcomes and measure impact vs. baseline

• Capture learnings into playbooks, templates, and internal tooling to make future deployments faster

• Help build the FDE function

• Establish the working cadence, QA standards, and documentation patterns

• Contribute to hiring profiles, interviews, and onboarding as we scale

You’ll collaborate directly with executives and frontline operators, switching comfortably between the shop floor and the boardroom. The work is hands‑on, fast‑moving, and deeply user‑centric.

Where this role is headed:

If you're the right fit and perform well, we want you to lead and build out the entire Deployment + Customer Success organizations. Over the next year, you'll help us scale from one Deployment Strategist to a team of dozens, establishing the playbooks, standards, and culture that will define how Forgepoint deploys AI workers across hundreds of manufacturers. This is a chance to shape a critical function from the ground up and grow into a leadership role as the company scales.

Who you are

• 3–7+ years in management consulting (Bain, BCG, McKinsey, or similar) or software implementation, with meaningful client‑facing delivery experience

• Strong process design instincts and an eye for simplification, measurement, and operational quality

• Exceptional communicator and facilitator who can run workshops, align stakeholders, and drive decisions

• Comfortable turning ambiguous business rules into precise operating procedures

• Data‑curious and analytical. Comfortable in spreadsheets and basic data exploration to validate assumptions

• Action‑oriented, organized, and calm under pressure. You close every loop.

• Excited to work in person 5 days a week in NYC and to travel to customer sites across the US

• Motivated by our mission to strengthen American manufacturing

Nice to have:

• Familiarity with software delivery or enterprise implementations

• Past experience in the manufacturing industry or other industrial setting

• Exposure to ERPs, MRPs, CRMs, or accounting systems common in manufacturing

• Experience designing SOPs and change‑management plans

• Awareness of LLM / AI concepts

• Light familiarity with our stack (TypeScript, NodeJS, React, PostgreSQL) is a plus, but not expected

What success looks like in 30, 60, 120 days

• 30 days: You’ve led discovery on one account, delivered a clear current‑state map, and proposed a phased agent plan

• 60 days: You’ve launched multiple agents in production for 1-2 customers with measurable impact, and trained + happy end users

• 120 days: You've successfully deployed agents across 5+ customers, documented measurable impact at each, and built an internal library of playbooks, templates, and automation tools that cut deployment time in half

Comp & Benefits

• Top‑tier salary and equity

• Great healthcare + gym stipend

• Covered lunch and dinner at the office

• Unlimited Celsius

• Travel across the USA to work side‑by‑side with our customers on their shop floors

Location

• Onsite in New York City. This role requires in‑person collaboration

Our Founders

Jack Strauss — Co‑Founder & CEO

Jack began his career working for some of the largest OEMs in the world, including Acer Computers and Northrop Grumman. He later joined Bain & Co’s manufacturing practice where he advised Fortune 500 industrial firms, primarily in the semiconductor and aerospace sectors. Jack then joined Xwing, an early stage startup developing an AI aircraft pilot, where he served as Chief of Staff as the company scaled from 25 to 150 employees in 18 months. Jack ultimately led Xwing’s entire GTM function, selling into the US military and aircraft OEMs before the company’s acquisition by Joby Aviation. Jack holds an MBA from Stanford University, and a BA in Chinese Studies from the University of Southern California. Jack is fluent in Mandarin and is an avid backpacker and spearfisher.

Alex Pareto — Co‑Founder & CTO

Alex began his career at Meta, just before founding Demeanor, a YC backed startup building tools for creators. Demeanor was later acquired by NTWRK / Complex, where he joined on as the Director of Engineering and built out their initial EPD team. After NTWRK, Alex joined Brex as a founding engineer on the Spend Management team. He grew with the product and was ultimately tapped to be Head of Engineering for the entire 40 person Spend Management engineering team. Alex holds a BS in Computer Science from the University of Southern California and is an avid skier & snowboarder.

How we work

• In person, every day in NYC — high bandwidth, high energy collaboration

• Talk to users constantly — We build with manufacturers, not for them

• Extreme ownership — We take full responsibility for outcomes. Own problems end-to-end and drive solutions without waiting for permission

If you’re driven, low‑ego, and excited to rebuild the digital backbone of American manufacturing, you’ll do the best work of your career here.