Federal Deployment Lead

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.

Requirements

• 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.
• 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
• 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

Benefits

Additional Information

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.

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