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.

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.

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. 

• 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.

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.

• 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 documenter. You can write a procedure a warden will sign, explain a policy change to a resident in plain language, and give a Product Manager a crisp account of what the product is doing wrong in the field.
• You are comfortable with, and curious about, technology and policy at the same time. You do not need to write code, but you need to understand how a statute becomes a sentence computation rule, how that rule becomes a data model, and where the two diverge in practice.
• Open-minded, humble, and empathetic. You listen actively, especially to partners who are subject matter experts in their own right, and you can navigate high-intensity experiences with incarcerated individuals and correctional line staff with steadiness and self-regulation.
• Willing to travel roughly 30 percent of the time, including regular visits to prisons and correctional headquarters.

• Experience implementing an enterprise or government system (an offender management system, an electronic health record, a case management platform) and living through the go-live.
• Experience working on a small, scrappy team and building repeatable processes where none existed.
• Familiarity with how corrections policy is written and changed: administrative regulations, statutes governing earned credit and custody, and the procedures that implement them.

Compensation is standardized based on roles and responsibilities. This ensures equitable compensation and responsible stewardship of our resources. As such, we do not negotiate compensation offers.

The compensation for this role is $99,750 (L1) or $117,600 (L2), depending on demonstrated skills, scope, and relevant experience.

• Effective, extremely thoughtful colleagues, working together on a mission that matters
• 90% medical, dental, and vision insurance coverage for you and your dependents
• Flexible time off, including 20 days of PTO, 3 days of paid volunteering time, and 13 paid holidays per year
• 401(k) retirement plan with 5% company match and no vesting period
• 12 weeks of paid parental leave
• Complimentary One Medical membership (availability based on location)
• Partnership with Carrot to provide employees with inclusive fertility and family-forming benefits, as well as a small but growing number of hormonal health and gender-affirming care benefits
• Monthly ClassPass credit for personal wellness
• Free mental health support via Talkspace
• Well-located offices in Oakland and Manhattan, with the flexibility to work remotely or go into either office as you choose
• An annual company offsite and other ad-hoc gatherings
• All the exhilarating challenges and stretch opportunities of a tech startup, combined with the mission-driven heart of a nonprofit

Recidiviz was an all-volunteer effort until early 2019, when Clementine, Andrew, and Joshua founded the organization. Since then, we've built an A-team of software engineers, designers, product managers and domain experts, from companies like Google, Apple, Dropbox, Opower, and Sidewalk Labs. Recidiviz was part of Y-Combinator's 2019 class and has received support from some of the most respected philanthropists and foundations, including Ford Foundation, Mackenzie Scott, Schmidt Futures, Arnold Ventures, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and the Mozilla Foundation.

Today, Recidiviz works with (and earns revenue from) over 20 state partners, big and small, red and blue, and touches over 46% of the country's incarcerated population. We have helped to get hundreds of thousands of people out of the criminal justice system, safely and equitably. In addition to partnering with state Departments of Corrections, Recidiviz collaborates with and learns from partners, from organizations like the Correctional Leaders Association (CLA) to community based organizations and justice-impacted individuals, whose perspectives guide our work.

To learn more about how we do what we do, check out our 2025 Year in Review, read some press coverage, or watch our TED Talk. And if you're really keen to see our work, you can dive into our Github :).

Lasting change is always built on diversity. Recidiviz recruits, employs, trains, compensates and promotes regardless of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, disability, age, veteran status, ancestry, citizenship, marital status, gender identity and all protected status as required by applicable law. We consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you have a special need that requires accommodation, please let us know in your application. Even if you don't think you meet all the criteria above, drop your resume, and we'll take a look. You might be great for another role or another time!