Deployment Strategist

Location: Remote, New York City, or Oakland, CA 

Role Type: Full-time 

Compensation: $99,750 (L1) or $117,600 (L2) depending on experience

Reports to: State Engagement Director

Visa sponsorship: Not available 

Hires remotely in: United States 

Travel: This role involves significant travel, roughly 30 percent of your time, to prisons, correctional headquarters, and parole offices in partner states.

 

Recidiviz is thrilled to be hiring a Deployment Strategist to join our State Engagement team! We're a small, fast-moving group that partners with state Departments of Corrections to safely and equitably reduce incarceration, and we are now building the systems those agencies run on: time computation, classification, intake, and moves management. That's where you come in. When a state adopts one of these systems, hundreds of correctional staff and thousands of incarcerated people experience a change in how their days work. You are the person who makes that change land: in the room with classification officers, records staff, case managers, and wardens, earning their trust, translating policy into practice, and making sure the people most affected by the change are the people most heard.

About us

Recidiviz is creating safer, healthier communities by improving outcomes for people in the criminal justice system. We build technology to reduce the number of people in prison and to help criminal justice leaders embrace data-driven decision-making.

Using software tools and thoughtful product design, we've been able to safely and permanently reduce incarceration and improve outcomes. We work side-by-side with leaders of the criminal justice system, people in prison and on supervision, and ecosystem partners to build a better path forward. In addition to the revenue we earn from state partners, some of the most respected philanthropists and foundations support our work.

People who succeed at Recidiviz lead with kindness and humility, assume good intent, learn from failure, and fix problems when they see them. They are excited to work arm in arm with government leadership and staff to improve outcomes. They are great listeners. They build deep relationships with and empathy for the people we work with and the people who our mission serves, even when those two groups feel at odds.

About the role

The Deployment Strategist owns whether a critical initiative actually lands. Whether the Director approves it, it ships on time, and the people who have to work differently are doing so. 

Inside the agency, you work the operational middle — the classification chiefs, records supervisors, unit managers, case managers, and facility leaders whose procedures and daily habits change when a module goes live. Inside Recidiviz, you hold the plan: what has to be built, configured, written, approved, and sequenced, and you run the operating cadence across the team. 

Core responsibilities

• Drive the deployments, internally and externally. You own the plan that gets an initiative out the door: what has to be built, configured, written, approved, and sequenced, by whom and by when. Up to half of this is internal, running the operating cadence across Account Management, Product, and Engineering, and being accountable for the initiative moving rather than for any one function’s piece of it. The artifact might be a module, a policy change, a revised procedure, or a new form; the job is the same. You notice when a workstream stalls before anyone tells you, and you unblock it.
• Map what landing requires, then run the change. When a state adopts classification or changes its earned-time policy, produce the full picture of what has to change: which policies constrain the rollout, which roles change what they do, which facilities have local practices needing adaptation, what gets signed off and in what order. Then turn it into the plan people follow — the policy-to-procedure crosswalk, the facility readiness checklist, the staff communications, the resident-facing explanation. When a policy change moves release dates for thousands of people, the case managers who will answer their questions are ready before the residents are told.
• Build and hold the operational middle. Be a known, trusted face to the 50 to 150 staff a tool touches: classification officers, records and sentence computation staff, case managers, program coordinators, wardens and deputy wardens. Understand what they are worried about before they escalate it. Develop local champions so trust scales past what you can personally carry.
• Make the next deployment easier. Turn what you learn landing a module in one state into playbooks, templates, and patterns Recidiviz reuses. Over time you become the person who has landed classification, or time computation, more times than anyone else here.

Wild success

Here are a few things you might accomplish in your first year at Recidiviz that would demonstrate wild success in this role:

• A tool in one of your states reaches operational steady state (every affected facility has a signed-off local procedure, confusion-driven support tickets have fallen below bug-driven tickets, and staff describe the system as how they do their jobs) measurably faster than the historical average for a Recidiviz launch of that type.
• Stakeholders in your states consistently take action that advances the deployment (approving procedure changes, volunteering facilities for early rollout, training their own teams) and that shows up as a sustained Operational EIAS (our monthly score of demonstrated stakeholder action) of 6.0 or higher across the leaders you track.
• A state where you landed one module goes on to fund a second, and the Director names the quality of the first rollout as a reason.
• Your change management plan for an earned-time policy change reaches thousands of residents with no spike in grievances or misinformation, because case managers were prepared first.
• Something you built in one state becomes the way Recidiviz does it everywhere, not because you wrote a doc, but because it worked.

Minimum qualifications

• You earn credibility with people who did not choose you. Correctional staff are busy, often skeptical, and have seen software promises before. You get taken seriously by being useful, direct, and reliable, not by being enthusiastic. You are as comfortable in a records office or a housing unit as you are in a conference room.
• You have led change inside a large operational organization. You have a track record of getting a policy, process, or system change adopted by people who did not report to you, in an environment that runs on policy, precedent, and paper: government, corrections, healthcare, logistics, enterprise software implementation, or similar. You might have been an Implementation Manager or consultant, a Deployment Strategist, a Program Manager on a system rollout, a Technical Account or Project Manager, or a Change Management Lead. Titles vary; what matters is that you were accountable for both the system going live and people working differently after go-live.
• You run projects without being asked to. Given an outcome and a nebulous space, you generate the plan, the milestones, and the stakeholder map, then drive them. You notice when something is off before it becomes a crisis and you raise it early.
• You are a clear communicator and a disciplined docu