Forward Deployed Strategist (AI)

The American higher education system is a beacon of innovation, opportunity, and transformation, shaping future leaders and advancing knowledge on a global scale. Yet, it faces unprecedented challenges - from rising costs to increasing demands for accessibility and relevance.

At CollegeVine, we’re on a mission to not only address these challenges, but also unlock new possibilities for operational efficiency, student success, and alumni advancement. We deploy safe AI Agents to drive real outcomes across campus and bring cutting-edge AI to the industry. Hundreds of universities trust us with the important job of communicating, advising, and helping millions of their constituents every single day.

As a Forward Deployed Strategist at CollegeVine, you’ll partner directly with our university customers to solve their biggest challenges using data, AI, and web technologies. You’ll work in small, cross-functional teams, owning end-to-end delivery of high-stakes projects: from requirements gathering and architecture to code, deployment, and ongoing support.

This role is ideal for someone who aspires to be both a technical leader and a strategic partner-think startup CTO meets solutions architect - with the opportunity to influence product direction and drive real outcomes for education institutions.

• Customer Engagement & Discovery

  • Rapidly understand complex customer workflows and pain points.

  • Translate domain needs into valuable technical solutions.

• End-to-End Delivery

  • Own design, development, testing, and deployment of custom features and integrations.

  • Collaborate with product managers, designers, engineers, data scientists, and customer success to iterate quickly.

• Data-Driven Problem Solving

  • Leverage large‐scale datasets, LLMs, and AI agents to surface insights and automate workflows.

  • Build dashboards, APIs, or custom agents that drive measurable impact.

• Travel & On-Site Collaboration

  • Occasional travel to client sites for discovery, workshops, training, and deployments.

• Experience & Expertise

  • 3+ years of product management, startup strategy & operations, consulting, investment banking, or software engineering experience, ideally including roles that involved solution delivery and customer-facing projects.

  • Proven ability to own complex projects end-to-end in a fast-moving environment.

• Problem-Solving Mindset

  • Deeply analytical, with a knack for breaking down ambiguous challenges into concrete solutions.

  • Eagerness to learn new tools, frameworks, and research - especially in ML/AI.

• Collaboration & Communication

  • Excellent interpersonal skills: able to bridge technical and non-technical audiences.

  • Humble, pragmatic, and coachable - valuing feedback and always seeking to raise the bar.

  • Making your work visible: share what you learn from customers with the broader org and make sure nobody is ever surprised by project status.

• Entrepreneurial Drive

  • Aspires to grow into an engineering leader or product-centric role.

  • Comfortable stepping into uncharted territory and defining what “done” looks like.

CollegeVine was originally founded in 2016 in Cambridge, MA and reaches over 20 million families annually in search of guidance. Our roots are in delivering near- peer mentorship at scale, which has since evolved to delivering lifelong guidance through AI and a vast professional network. We have raised over $66m in venture funding from dedicated investors such as Morningside Technology Ventures (Xiaomi, TikTok), the founding partner of 5Y Capital, Fidelity, University Ventures, and more. In 2020, after years of being a remote-friendly company, CollegeVine became a fully remote company centered on Eastern Time with a diverse cast of team members based predominantly in the United States, but also around the world.