Founding Deployment Strategist

San Francisco, CA
Full-time
Visa Sponsorship

About the role

About Poka Labs

Poka Labs builds AI agents that automate pricing, quoting, and cross-sell for complex manufacturing businesses. Specialty chemicals, pipe fittings, abrasives, advanced materials, adhesives, coatings, metals. Industries where technical specs drive pricing, catalogs run to 20,000+ SKUs, and the best account managers carry decades of tribal knowledge in their heads.

A typical quote at one of our prospects: customer emails an RFQ. The account manager/engineer decodes the product and configurations, checks inventory, factors in tariffs, freight, customer history, and competition, then gets internal approval. Weeks go by, multiple people, and customers get left in the dark.

Our AI agents run 24/7 doing this work. A week becomes five minutes. Win rates go up. Margin improves. Customers grow.

Deployed at F100 enterprises and mid-market manufacturers. Based in SF, growing fast.


About the Role

Part implementation manager, part customer success, and part product manager. We looking for someone to bridge the gap between our customers and our engineering team, helping customers get the most out of the product as it is today and help our engineering team learn what is needed from the product tomorrow.

You will work with our customers post sale to understand how our product fits into their existing workflow, mapping out how to integrate with their existing systems and data with our product. You will then own the initial customer relationship as they get going, helping them adopt and configure the product to meet their needs.

This role is based in San Fransisco in office with occasional travel to meet with customers.

Job Requirements

  • Deeply understand customers current workflows and work with our engineering team to configure our product.
  • Basic data cleaning and organizing to get a customer up and running
  • Meet with customers on a regular cadence to understand whats going well and where we are following short.
  • Monitor logs and other error signals to catch and resolve issues before our customers do
  • San Francisco in office 5 days a week
  • Travel up to 25% of the time

You Might be Good Fit:

  • Have a technical background or experience using Claude Code, with a willingness to dive into code as needed
  • 3-8 years in a technical customer-facing role (consulting, solutions engineering, implementation, or similar)
  • You have strong customer empathy and an ability to explain highly technical concepts to a less technical audience
  • You’re happy to pick up slack where needed. This role touches a ton of areas of the company and is likely be very dynamic.

Also Nice To Have

  • Experience working with industrial customers and messy ERP data
  • Experience using or building AI agents

About Poka Labs

Poka Labs builds AI-powered digital workers for the chemical and specialty manufacturing industry. From quote to shipment, leading chemical companies use Poka Labs' AI platform to automate operations and elevate customer experiences.

The company tackles a massive inefficiency in chemical manufacturing: the quoting and pricing process. A typical quote involves decoding product configurations, checking inventory, factoring in tariffs, freight, customer history, and competition. Poka Labs' AI agents do this work 24/7, turning a week-long process into five minutes. Win rates go up, margins improve, and customers grow.

Poka Labs is YC-backed (W24) with investment from Pioneer Fund, Flybridge, and Liquid 2 Ventures. The company is deployed at Fortune 100 enterprises and mid-market manufacturers, having recently closed its first seven-figure deal and expanding into European deployments with GDPR-compliant infrastructure.

Founded by Harvard HBS alumni with deep domain experience in both technology (ex-Facebook) and the chemical industry, Poka Labs is building the intelligence layer of modern manufacturing from their San Francisco office.

Other roles at Poka Labs

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Job details

Salary

$140,000 - $200,000

Equity

0.5% - 0.75%

Location

San Francisco, CA

Experience

3+ years

Company

NamePoka Labs
Industryai, manufacturing, enterprise, b2b
Team Size5

Funding

Total raised

$500K

Last stage

Seed

Investors

Y Combinator

Founders

WC

Wayne Cheng

Founding Software Engineer

Andrew Bass

Andrew Bass

Co-Founder & CTO

LinkedIn
Malay Shah

Malay Shah

Founder and CEO

LinkedIn

What happens next.

No applications, no recruiter spam. Just the intro.

01

Confirm the fit

A few questions to make sure this role is the right shape for you. Two minutes.

02

I pitch you to the company

I write the intro, send it to the founder, and handle the back-and-forth.

03

A meeting lands on your calendar

If they’re a yes, I book the chat. You show up — that’s the whole job-hunt.