Deployment Strategist Lead

• Build and lead the deployment strategist team. Hire, develop, and set the performance bar as the function scales. Define the playbooks, operational cadences, and communication standards that every engagement runs on. Maintain operational oversight across all active deployments, ensuring nothing falls through on any engagement and that learnings cross-pollinate across the team.
• In addition to managing the team, be the leader who is accountable for all deployments end to end, from initial planning through evaluation, production adoption, and sustained usage. You are the primary operational point of contact responsible for product outcomes and impact at the customer, and you help reshape scope, sequencing, and success criteria in partnership with leadership and the forward-deployed engineering team as you learn what the customer actually needs.
• Go onsite and immerse yourself in customer workflows. Synthesize disconnected streams of information, from customer conversations to product data to stakeholder dynamics, into a clear picture of what the most important problem is and what the deployment needs to do about it. You are not satisfied with surface-level answers.
• Act as the information router for the engagement. Translate unstructured customer meetings into organized, actionable summaries with clear owners and deadlines. Track every thread, every commitment, and every action item. Push structured updates proactively, because information gaps create risk.
• Present results and proposals for future work to audiences ranging from IC engineers to C-suite executives. Lead customer enablement and training to ensure the product is having concrete impact on production workflows.
• Surface deployment reality back to product and engineering teams and embed what you learn in the field into how Normal builds and ships product across all customers.
• Set the hiring bar for the function. You know what "good" looks like because you do the job yourself at the highest level, and you evaluate candidates against the actual demands of the role.

• Experience in customer-facing technical roles such as deployment strategy, solutions engineering, technical program management with customer-facing delivery, consulting, or product management at enterprise technology companies. Experience at companies with forward-deployed or embedded delivery models (Palantir, Databricks, or similar) is highly relevant.
• Strong project management discipline and enough technical fluency to navigate sophisticated enterprise environments. You do not need to write code, but you need enough fluency to earn credibility with customer engineering teams and understand the product deeply.
• Highly structured and relentless about detail. You track dozens of threads across multiple stakeholders, time zones, and workstreams and do not let a single one drop. You thrive in complex deployment environments and find this pace energizing, not exhausting.
• Proactive communication as a default operating mode. You push updates before anyone asks, anticipate what leadership and the customer need to know, and spot problems when they are small and flag them before they become crises.
• The ability to influence senior and IC stakeholders with empathy and credibility. You align internal engineering teams with customer operational stakeholders, and you succeed through communication quality, follow-through, and trust.
• Sharp intuition for product and a strong degree of user insight. You dig into the details of customer workflows until you understand what is actually happening and why, and you confront open-ended problems in unstructured environments with curiosity and analytical rigor.
• Low ego because the outcome matters more than who gets the credit. Adaptive and introspective, willing to learn, guide, lead, and follow depending on what the situation requires.
• Experience hiring, developing, and leading small teams in high-stakes, customer-facing environments, ideally where team members are distributed across different customer sites. You hold the bar accordingly.

Bonus Points For

• Background in semiconductor design, verification workflows, EDA tooling, or adjacent domains.
• Experience building AI products in early-stage startups or 0-to-1 environments, or ownership scaling 1-N.
• Experience in Linear - especially creating tracking product and engineering issues and coordinating project deliverables
• Prior experience deploying AI or ML systems into production environments.

The Normal Team builds foundational software and hardware that help move technology forward, supporting the semiconductor industry, critical AI infrastructure, and the broader systems that power our world. We work as one team across New York, San Francisco, Copenhagen, Seoul, and London. Your Role in Our Mission You will lead the deployment strategist function at Normal, owning the success of Normal EDA deployments at the world's leading semiconductor companies while building and leading the team that scales this capability across customers. This is a player-coach role. You will be on the ground at customer sites, embedded with engineering teams, serving as the connective tissue between the customer, our forward-deployed engineers, product, engineering, and the business team. You will also define what excellent deployment execution looks like at Normal, hire and develop the team around it, and set the operational bar that every customer engagement runs on. Normal EDA is a purpose-built AI platform for silicon engineering that combines LLMs with formal logic to build an understanding of a team's design intent and uses that context to generate, verify, and optimize engineering artifacts, learning continuously from the team's feedback Success is measured by production deployments, sustained customer value, measurable shifts in verification workflows driven by Normal, the stickiness measured by WAUs and the quality and speed of communication with every stakeholder who depends on you.