Founding Engagement Strategist & General Manager

About the role

This is a founding seat at Starbridge. You'll own the relationship, scope, and outcomes for our first deep institutional engagement: a multi-year partnership with a major public higher education institution serving tens of thousands of students. You'll define what a successful Starbridge deployment looks like at this scale, then build the playbook the rest of the company runs on.

You'll sit at the highest executive levels of the customer (system office, chancellor's office, unit heads, institutional research, IT) and translate their priorities into product scope. You'll be paired with a Founding Forward-Deployed Engineer who owns the code; you own the relationship, the scope, and the outcomes. Together you'll run a multi-million dollar P&L from day one.

What You'll Do

• Own the customer relationship end to end — from the State to the Chancellor's office to the operational unit heads to the IT and institutional research teams

• Sit at the highest levels of a massive customer and translate the priorities of executive leadership into product scope

• Partner with a founding engineer to ship software that actually gets adopted, not just delivered

• Define what success looks like, how we measure it, and how we get there

• Build the playbook for how Starbridge embeds inside public agencies & institutions and help us scale this motion into a category-defining practice

• Own the P&L from end-to-end

Qualifications

• 3+ years owning enterprise or institutional customer relationships, with at least one engagement of 18+ months where you were the primary commercial and strategic owner from kickoff through renewal or expansion.

• Direct accountability for $1M+ in annual contract value or program budget you owned outcomes for, including authoring the success metrics yourself rather than inheriting them from sales or leadership.

• Authorship of customer requirements docs, statements of work, or product roadmaps that engineering shipped against. You can point to specific decisions where you held the line on what was in or out of scope.

• 4 days a week onsite at our NYC office

• Ability to travel to customer sites roughly once a week

Interview Process

We move fast — really fast. Getting back to someone today beats tomorrow, and our interview process reflects that mindset. Please keep us posted on your timeline so we can move quickly and speed things up where needed. All interviews are conducted via Google Meet.

How We Work

• Build Bridges to Help Customers Win - We pride ourselves on being obsessively customer-centric.

• Shooting Star Speed - We move with extreme speed. We value momentum, decisiveness, and the ability to accelerate when it matters.

• Fun Is a Feature - Fun is a Feature means we intentionally design Starbridge to be an energizing place to do hard work. Joy, humor, and camaraderie make great teams faster, sharper, and more resilient.

• In the Arena - We believe the best ideas come from living close to the work, feeling the friction, hearing the nuance, and experiencing the details firsthand.

Benefits include:

• Competitive salary + early-stage equity

• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance

• Company provided lunch in office everyday

• 75% coverage of Chelsea Piers Fitness membership

• Unlimited PTO

• Regular offsites (NYC + global locations)