Federal Deployment Lead

Job description

THREAD AI Thread AI is focused on building an AI orchestration engine and is looking for dedicated individuals to join its growing team. Our goal is to make infrastructure simple for enterprises and public sector agencies seeking to get the most from AI and AI Agents. Headquartered in New York, our growing team is a group of experts who have a track record of creating and executing against complex workflows and infrastructure. We are a lean team of engineers, strategists, and product thinkers - with a co-founding team that spent the better part of a decade building AI/ML products at Palantir that were deployed across both the private sector and public sector. We believe that a small dedicated team with a flat structure and collaborative culture can move faster and build better products than large hierarchical organizations. We believe that if AI is going to change the way we work, we have an obligation to make it trustworthy, verifiable, and human-centered. That belief shapes everything we build and how we operate. ABOUT THE ROLE This is not a project management role, but a hybrid of strategic thinking, technical fluency, client partnership, and relentless ownership. - Own the full lifecycle: Walk into a federal agency, decompose their hardest problems, architect a path to production on Lemma, and drive it to completion - through compliance, politics, and technical uncertainty. - Navigate the federal landscape: Scope requirements with a federal CTO, map data flows across agency systems, prepare ATO materials, and anticipate where compliance will get stuck before it does. - Make sound technical calls: Design multi-tenant deployment architectures, pressure-test assumptions with engineering, and engage substantively on trade-offs between approaches. - Shape the practice: Help define how Thread AI approaches the federal market - the strategy, partnerships, delivery model, and hiring. This is a founding role. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - First-principles thinker: You decompose complex, ambiguous problems into their load-bearing assumptions instinctively. You synthesize technical constraints, political dynamics, compliance requirements, and user behavior into a cohesive plan. - Federal fluency: Navigated at least some of: FedRAMP, ATO packages, FISMA, NIST 800-53, IL4/IL5. etc. You don't need to be a compliance engineer, but you need to design delivery approaches that work within the landscape. - Technical depth: You can read an architecture diagram and spot where it will break. You understand how APIs, data pipelines, orchestration engines, and AI/ML models fit together. Experience with AWS/GCP/Azure, multi-tenant architectures, or AI/ML deployment patterns is a strong plus. - Delivery under real constraints: You've shipped something meaningful in production, not a demo. Federal, defense, or IC experience is ideal; heavily regulated domains (financial services, healthcare, energy) also count if the complexity was comparable. - Ownership as identity: You see projects through from beginning to end. On a team of fewer than 30, there is nowhere to hide. That excites you. NICE TO HAVES - Active TS/SCI clearance, or an active Secret clearance with ability to obtain TS/SCI. - Direct experience deploying AI/ML systems in federal or DoD environments. - Familiarity with FedRAMP High or Moderate authorization processes from the vendor or agency side. - Experience at a forward-deployed technology company operating in the federal space. - Background in data engineering, systems integration, or platform architecture - enough to have opinions about how orchestration layers should work. - Experience operating in early-stage environments (Series A/B) where you've had to build the playbook, not follow one. WHY THREAD AI You'll join a company at the moment where operational decisions compound. The systems you build will define how Thread AI scales - not just in headcount, but in how we think, decide, and execute. You'll work alongside a founding team that spent years at the intersection of AI and enterprise infrastructure, and a team of builders from Palantir, Goldman Sachs, Google, Uber, and MIT who chose this problem because they believe it's one of the most important in enterprise technology. We believe that in an age where AI can generate content so easily, focusing on what is human, what is true, and what is verifiable is more important than ever. That philosophy applies to our product and it applies to how we run the company. We want someone who holds our operations to the same standard of rigor, transparency, and intentionality that we hold our technology. If you believe that the hardest operational problems in AI infrastructure deserve the same intellectual rigor as the technology itself, we want to meet you. We’re committed to creating a space where our employees can bring their full selves to work and have equal opportunity to succeed. So regardless of race, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, religion, origin, ability, or age, we encourage you to apply! Don’t meet every single requirement? If you’re excited about this role and the company but your past experience doesn’t align with every qualification, we still encourage you to apply anyway - we'd love to get to know you and see if there's a place for you at Thread! COMPENSATION The base pay range for this role is $150,000 – $230,000 per year + Equity. Applicant must be a U.S. citizen or national or U.S. lawful, permanent resident. This is a full-time, in-person position based at our New York City office.