Strategic Projects Manager

About the role:

Quartermaster builds maritime coverage by placing sensing equipment aboard commercial ships worldwide, and we are scaling fast. The Strategic Projects Lead is our high-output generalist — a Swiss Army knife who reports to the founding team and unit leaders and moves dynamically between sales, operations, and growth depending on where the business needs leverage most.

You will take highly ambiguous problems and turn them into delivered outcomes, acting as the quarterback across teams — recruiting, installs, logistics, commercial, and product. In practice the role blends an operations manager, a product manager, and a client-facing engagement manager, and it is built for an elite operator who can go from a blank page to a high-quality answer, then make it real.

What you'll do:

• Own ambiguous, high-stakes problems end to end. Take a loosely defined question from the founders or a unit leader, structure it, get to the answer, and drive it to a result, not a deck that sits on a shelf.

• Quarterback across teams. Coordinate operations, commercial, and product to land projects that no single team owns, keeping everyone aligned and unblocking whatever stalls.

• Produce technical and financial outputs at a high quality bar. Build the unit-economics models, business cases, operational analyses, and data-backed recommendations that decisions get made on — rigorous enough to withstand scrutiny from the founders, the board, and investors.

• Move where the business needs you. One month that might be standing up recruiting in a new market; the next, fixing an operational bottleneck or running a commercial pilot with a shipping customer.

• Turn one-off projects into repeatable processes. When a project proves out, hand it off with the playbook, tooling, and metrics a permanent team can run without you.

Example projects you might own:

• Growth: model the economics of entering a new region, then run the pilot that proves (or kills) it.

• Operations: diagnose why it takes too long to get equipment installed and live, and design the fix across logistics and field teams.

• Sales / commercial: build the business case and pitch for a large shipping-company customer, then help run the engagement to close.

• Finance / strategy: build the cost-per-unit-of-coverage model that leadership uses to prioritize where to grow next, and the analysis behind a board or fundraising update.

What we're looking for:

• 2–4 years at a top-tier management consulting firm (MBB or equivalent), with a track record of top performance.

• Startup experience at a high growth/scaling company preferred.

• High-quality technical and financial output. You can build a clean financial model and a credible quantitative or operational analysis yourself, and you hold a high bar on rigor and polish.

• Comfort with ambiguity and ownership. You do your best work with a vague prompt and no template, and you measure yourself on outcomes shipped, not slides produced.

• Cross-functional range. Credible and effective across sales, operations, and growth — able to earn the trust of specialists in each without being one.

• Bias to action and high output. You move fast, sweat the details, and get things over the line in a startup that is scaling quickly.

• Strong communication. You can brief the founders, align a cross-team group, and speak credibly to an external customer.

Nice to have:

• Exposure to maritime, logistics, hardware, supply chain, or another operationally complex, physical-world business.

• Hands-on data skills (SQL, Python, or strong spreadsheet/BI work) to pull your own answers rather than wait on others.

• Early-stage startup or founding-team experience.

• Ability to travel 50%