Forward Deployed Strategist

FORWARD DEPLOYED STRATEGIST @ VARICK AGENTS ABOUT VARICK: Varick builds AI agents that take over real operational workflows inside the world's largest enterprises. Our forward-deployed engineers and strategists embed with client teams to map how work gets done and build POCs, then our engineers bring those agents into production. We're venture-backed, revenue-generating from day one, and already in production inside several of these companies. You'll join an elite team from Meta, AWS Bedrock, Citadel Securities, McKinsey, BCG, Stanford, and more. ABOUT THE ROLE: Forward Deployed Strategists are the client-facing operators at Varick. You embed with enterprise stakeholders ranging from C-suite to operators on the ground. You run discovery with process leads, diagnose where the operation actually breaks, and own the engagement from the first conversation to the agent running in production. This is a role for people who communicate clearly, think like operators, and reason like investors. You sit across the table from a CFO and a junior controller, map how the process actually runs (not merely how the documentation says it does), and turn that into a clear business case and a brief our engineers can build against. You don't need to write the code. You need to know what to build, why it matters, and how to land it with the client. You also need to be the person to bring the stakeholders along. You will co-create KPIs with leadership, shape how process owners will work alongside the agents, and plan and execute change management initiatives. You will learn AI here by doing it, not by osmosis. You'll work side by side with our engineers on live deployments, scope agents yourself, and use the same AI-native toolkit we use to run the company. There is an enormous difference between reading about agents and running them inside a Fortune 500 team. This role lives in that difference. WHAT YOU'LL DO: - Embed with client teams across departments (from finance, sales, and IT to marketing, HR, and operations) to map how work gets done, step by step and system by system. Go beyond the golden path. Find the exceptions, the workarounds, and the impact of handoffs across teams - Run discovery engagements with real rigor: stakeholder interviews, process mapping, hypothesis-driven analysis, and executive readouts - Build the business case. Size the opportunity, model the value, and prioritize which workflows to automate first based on where the dollars and the hours actually are - Translate ambiguous business problems into well-framed agent briefs with clear success criteria, guardrails, and a definition of done that our engineers can build against - Co-create KPIs with clients, baseline them before go-live, and own the story of post-deployment uplift - Drive adoption: train the client's team, sit with the users, watch what they actually do, and feed what you see back into the next iteration - Present findings, recommendations, and results directly to C-suite stakeholders, and defend them under pressure. Top tier communication is a requirement for this role. If you don't have what it takes to command a room of the world's largest executives, you are not a good fit for this role - Codify what works into Varick's playbooks, frameworks, and broader toolkit. Share field signal with our product and engineering teams: where the agents create value, where they fall short, and what clients will need next - Build and leverage relationships with existing Varick clients to help them identify their biggest opportunities for additional AI transformation, whether that's more agentic initiatives within the same department or an expansion to a new department within the same org WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR: The role combines 3 skillsets that are rare to find in 1 individual, and you need to be one of the best across all three: 1) Communication, 2) Analysis, and 3) Commercial judgment. The list below highlights tactical examples of how you can show your experience across these. - A track record of solving hard, ambiguous problems for senior stakeholders and seeing the result through, whether you got there as a banker, a private equity investor, a consultant, a BizOps or strategy lead, or a founder. We care more about what you've owned and delivered than where you trained - Communication and client presence. You can hold a room of executives, push back on a CFO without losing them, and tailor your depth to the audience. You communicate clearly and effectively, both async and sync, to any audience. You can explain topics at different altitude levels and switch between them effortlessly - Analytical with an extreme learning gradient. You have the rigor to put well-documented, well-researched answers in front of clients and colleagues. You can model a business, pressure-test a number, and pick up a new industry or workflow almost instantly, whether a client is walking you through it in an interview or you're teaching yourself over a weekend - Strong commercial sense. You understand where the value is, who's paying for it, and what a successful engagement looks like from the client's side of the table - AI-curious and AI-fluent. You use AI tools every day, you follow the space closely, and you have a point of view on where agents work, where they don't, and what's coming next. You don't need to be an engineer, but you want to go deep, and you can communicate clearly with engineers about what to build HELPFUL EXPERIENCE: - Investment Banking (ideally IBD) at a top-tier bank such as Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan, Bank of America, or Citi, specifically M&A, ECM, DCM, or LevFin - Private Equity on the investment team (analyst or associate) at a top-tier fund such as Blackstone, KKR, Apollo, Carlyle, or TPG - Top-tier strategy consulting (McKinsey, BCG, Bain), especially with a digital, AI, or operations focus - BizOps, Chief of Staff, or corporate strategy at a high-growth startup or mid-size tech company - Deployment Strategist at a top-tier AI company - Founder or early employee at a startup that sold into the enterprise - Transformation or operations leadership inside a large enterprise, in finance, ops, or strategy functions at a Fortune 500 CULTURE: - Extreme ownership. You own the tasks end-to-end, at an extreme level. You think beyond the task at hand, consider upstream and downstream impact, and are accountable for the entire outcome - An instinctual sense of urgency. You thrive in and help foster an environment with urgency. When a new client request comes in, it is instinctually clear to you how that fits into the existing prioritization list. If it goes to the top of the list, you jump on it immediately, help the rest of the team realize the shift, and consider any impact of de-prioritizing other items - Low ego, high agency. We are all on this rocket ship together. If you win, the team wins and vice versa. You don't wait for permission to pursue a task. If you can do something that moves the needle, do it - Curious. Our work requires deep curiosity, both when it comes to understanding the clients' work and what matters to them, and when it comes to keeping up with and adopting the latest AI developments. Examples to showcase this could be pursuing niche interests, reading textbooks on the weekend, questioning the latest research, etc. - Perfectionist. You must be proud of your work product. In a client-facing business, it is critical that we put correct, well-informed, and well-documented material in front of the client. We are held to the highest standards and embody that mindset internally within Varick too - Startup mindset. Things are ambiguous. The hours are long. Weekend work is expected. And this excites you. With AI, the world is moving extremely quickly, and the ways of working are changing every day. We are at the forefront and help facilitate this rapid change. In the next 3, 5, and 10 years, things are going to change significantly, and you join to work hard and be a part of this exciting journey towards an AI-native future - Feedback metabolism. You never need the same correction twice, and you treat every review as compounding rather than criticism. You spot opportunities to give, and are comfortable giving, feedback to all of your peers, be it upward, downward, or horizontal - Competitive. You are here to win. You are driven by performing better than competitors, and by delivering outcomes that move the needle. Your background speaks to your competitive mindset with top performance in e.g., sports, eSports, former career, research, etc. - Based in SF or willing to relocate. On-site in our Financial District office. Comfortable with 20–40% travel to client sites WHAT THIS ROLE ISN'T: - Not a software engineering role. You won't be writing production code. If that's what you want, see our Forward Deployed Engineer and Software Engineering postings - Not a pure strategy role. Our clients respect our AI-native, technical approach and repeatedly highlight how this sets us apart from consulting shops. Your recommendations ship and run - Not a research role. You won't train or fine-tune models - Not implementation-by-checklist. Nobody hands you a configured product to roll out WHY VARICK: - Early to the thesis. We bet on this category before it was obvious, and we're already working with multi-hundred-billion-dollar companies - Real ownership, not slide-deck purgatory. If you're tired of making recommendations that never get implemented, or spending a month polishing a deck no one reads, come build something that actually ships and runs - Learn AI by doing it. You'll scope and deploy agents with our engineers on live client work, not watch from the sidelines - High-bar team. Everyone here is someone you'll want to learn from: operators, engineers, and strategists at the top of their craft - Direct access to operators and executives (C-suite, ops leads), with none of the layers, decks-for-decks-sake, or process overhead of a traditional firm - You own the full loop: find the problem, frame it, scope the solution, see it ship, see it run - Small, early team. Your judgment shapes the product, the playbooks, and how Varick scales - Value creation in days, not quarters. An agent you scoped on Monday can be running against real invoices by the end of the month - Meaningful equity at a stage where it still compounds We are an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or protected veteran status. Employment is subject to a standard confidentiality and non-disclosure agreement.