Product Specialist
Istari Digital builds the connective tissue for defense acquisition. Our platform lets engineering models, simulations, and digital threads move securely across primes, suppliers, and government program offices, so a system can be tested, trusted, and fielded in months rather than years. We work at the center of some of the hardest problems in defense acquisition: getting the right model, to the right person, at the right classification, at the right time. We are a small, senior team, and every hire changes what the company can do next.
The role
Istari is a platform for sharing and working on engineering data in highly regulated, no-fail industries — where a mistake can cost a mission, an aircraft, or a life. Teams building spacecraft, hypersonic vehicles, and submarines use it to keep their models, simulations, and test results connected, so they can move fast and not break things.
We’re hiring a Product Specialist to be the connective tissue between our product and the people who use and sell it. This is an early-career role with an unusual amount of surface area: some days you’ll be interviewing customers about what’s working and what isn’t, other days you’ll be building a one-pager for the sales team, recording a demo of a feature that shipped last week, or turning a pile of feedback from customer-facing teams into something product can act on.
We’re not hiring for years of experience. We’re hiring for smarts and hustle — someone who learns fast, follows through on everything they pick up, and finds real energy in being useful across a lot of fronts at once. You’ll work directly with our Head of Product, and you’ll learn how product gets built at a company where the users are aerospace and defense engineers and the stakes are real.
Done well, this role is a launchpad. You’ll touch customer research, product marketing, sales enablement, and product management in your first year — and the more you take on, the more you’ll be given.
Core Responsibilities
- Gather customer feedback: sit in on customer calls, run lightweight interviews, and watch how people actually use the product.
- Collect and organize feedback from customer-facing teams — sales, deployment, support — into clear themes the product team can act on, and close the loop so those teams know they were heard.
- Create sales collateral: one-pagers, demo scripts, feature explainers, and competitive snippets that help the sales team tell the product’s story well.
- Demo features to customers and internal teams — showing a systems engineer how a supplier working in NX and a prime working in CATIA can verify against each other on every revision — and keep our demo environments and materials current as the product evolves.
- Help the product team with whatever moves the mission: release notes, documentation checks, testing a new feature before it ships.
Qualifications and Who Thrives in This Role
We hire for judgment, curiosity, and a bias toward action more than for a specific degree or years of experience. That said, people who do well in this role tend to share a few things:
- 0–3 years of work experience. New grads are welcome. What matters is evidence of hustle — a project you shipped, a club you ran, a job where you clearly did more than the description asked.
- Strong writing. Most of this job is turning messy input into clear output, and clear writing is how that happens.
- Genuine curiosity about how things work — the product, the customer’s world, why a deal closed or didn’t. You ask good questions and actually listen to the answers.
- Follow-through. When you pick something up, it gets done, and nobody has to check.
- Comfort with technology. You don’t need to code, but you’ll be demoing a technical product to engineers, and you should enjoy learning it deeply enough to do that well.
- Directness. When asked for your best guess, you give it — you don’t hedge.
Preferred, not required
- A portfolio of things you’ve made — writing, videos