Founding Strategy Lead

About Ripline

Ripline is an applied research lab deploying specialized intelligence in critical industries (i.e. aerospace, defense, and more). Our focus is to deploy agents that automate operational work.

We’re backed by Khosla Ventures (Adrian Radu, Keith Rabois), Hanabi Capital (Shreyan Jain, Mike Volpi), SV Angel, SF1, and other investors. Our angels include founders/execs at OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Cursor, Decagon, CoreWeave, Profound, Northwood Space, Solidworks, and more.

About the Role

Ripline is hiring someone with the ethos and expertise within specific mission-critical industries to help turn customer relationships from initial conversation to successful deployments. You’ll work with the founders across go-to-market, field deployments, customer operations, and product feedback. You’ll meet folks in person, understand deeply how these industries operate, and make sure Ripline solves problems that matter to them.

This is a relationship- and execution-heavy role, not a software engineering position. You should be technically fluent enough to work with the product team and help customers adopt what we build, but you won’t own the agent runtime.

What you'll do

• Build relationships with customers and prospects through on-site meetings, industry events, and conferences.

• Lead discovery: understand workflows, stakeholders, buying processes, and operational constraints.

• Help move opportunities from first conversation through deployment and ongoing adoption.

• Coordinate between customers, founders, and engineers so requirements are clear and work keeps moving.

• Bring industry insight into product and go-to-market decisions.

• Identify where an approach developed for one customer could serve others.

What we're looking for

• Deep, firsthand expertise in a mission-critical industry, such as defense, aerospace, energy, robotics, automotive, or industrials, with spiky project experience

• A strong network and genuine comfort meeting customers and partners in person.

• Experience with business development, customer-facing operations, or complex enterprise sales.

• Enough technical fluency to discuss integrations, deployment constraints, and AI-enabled workflows with customers and engineers.

• High agency: you can spot an opportunity, build trust, and follow through.

Nice to have

• Experience taking a technical product into regulated or security-sensitive organizations.

• Experience in ITAR-regulated environments.

• Founder or early-stage startup experience.