Head Of Deployment

About the Company

Adalat AI is building an end-to-end justice tech stack that automates manual and clerical pain points in courtrooms, giving judges back time to focus on what matters most: decision-making and delivering justice. Our products — AI-powered transcription in Indian languages, court dashboards, WhatsApp chatbots for litigants and advocates, AI-powered workflows for judges and registries, and the Paperless Courts platform that lets a state run its judiciary end-to-end on Adalat's infrastructure — are now deployed across 10 states, covering nearly 25% of India's judiciary.

Our work has been the subject of a Stanford case study, has won the Harvard President's Innovation Challenge, MIT Solve, and the AI Innovation Challenge at the Global AI Summit, and has been profiled in the Wall Street Journal. Backed by leading technology companies and funders, and incubated at MIT and Oxford, Adalat AI is working to eliminate judicial delays and expand access to timely justice. Founded by a team with backgrounds in law, technology, and economics from Harvard, Oxford, MIT, and IIIT Hyderabad, we are scaling rapidly across India and the Global South.

Role Overview

Adalat AI ships products into India's state judiciaries — AI-powered transcription, court dashboards, WhatsApp chatbots, AI-powered workflows for judges and registries, and the Paperless Courts platform. Each state we enter becomes its own multi-stakeholder programme: aligning Adalat's product and engineering teams with the state's IT leadership, judicial sponsors, and existing systems; negotiating realistic deliverables and timelines; managing scope, risk, and dependencies over an 18–24 month deployment arc; and seeing every commitment through to live courtrooms. Somebody has to own that programme end-to-end from Adalat's side — the cross-functional spine that holds the state, the product team, and the engineering team together. That is this role.

The Head of Deployments reports directly to the CTO and sits at the intersection of Adalat's product, engineering, and field operations. You are the single owner of how Adalat delivers to each state — from first conversation through live deployment and expansion. Day-to-day, this is a managerial and multi-dimensional role: scoping new projects with the state's IT counterparts and CIS owners; sequencing the work with Adalat's engineers and product managers; setting and defending realistic timelines; managing scope changes, dependencies, and risks; running the engagement cadence with the state; and closing the loop on delivery.

You will work shoulder-to-shoulder with Adalat's Operations organisation — the Head of Ops, Regional Ops Managers, and State Leads. Ops owns the operational and relationship surface inside a state; you own how Adalat's product and delivery land. The two together are how a state becomes successful on Adalat. This is an execution role with strategic responsibility — managerial and cross-functional in shape, not engineering, not product, and not strategy. Product managers already own what the products do; you own whether they land in each state on time, on spec, and with the state's confidence intact.

The first project will be Paperless Courts — Adalat's most ambitious and operationally complex deployment to date, the system on which a state's judiciary runs end-to-end, from filing to disposal, on its own infrastructure. Paperless carries the heaviest customisation surface, the deepest integration work, and the longest delivery arc of anything in the portfolio, which makes it the right place to build the muscle for everything that follows. Over time, you will own how Adalat lands across each state, across the full product portfolio.

This is the first hire of its kind at Adalat.

Key Responsibilities

1. Own the lifecycle of an engagement with state judiciary on projects

Lead each state from the day they show interest to the day Adalat's products are live and stable in their courtrooms — through scoping, contracting, CIS integration, deployment, training, go-live, and expansion across benches and product lines.
Build and maintain the engagement plan: milestones, deliverables, dependencies, risks. At any moment, know what is on track, what is at risk, and what is blocked.
Be the single internal owner of each engagement. When something is unclear about a state — who agreed to what, when, and why — you are the source of truth.

2. Manage stakeholders inside every state

Build deep trust with the technical stakeholder in each state — the court's IT team, the vendors, the NIC integration owner. Understand their architecture, their constraints, and their operating environment.
Build deep trust with the non-technical stakeholder — the Registrar, the Chief Justice's office, the senior judge sponsoring the deployment. Translate technical reality into the language and stakes they care about. Manage expectations on timelines, capabilities, and trade-offs proactively, not reactively.
Be visible. Travel when needed. Be the face the state sees when things go well and when they do not.

3. Orchestrate Adalat's internal team around each engagement

Run the cadence: weekly internal syncs, weekly external syncs, monthly steering committees with the court. Walk into each meeting with a clear agenda and walk out with clear decisions.
Surface blockers early. When engineering needs a decision from the customer, you get the decision. When the customer needs a fix from engineering, you make sure it lands.
Hold state leads accountable to the engagement plan. Hold product and engineering honest about what they have committed to.

4. Define the playbook for the next ten states

This is the first role of its kind. The playbook for how Paperless Courts is delivered does not exist yet. You will write it.
Every state you run is also a chance to standardise: the onboarding deck, the technical questionnaire, the integration runbook, the training curriculum, the go-live checklist, the post-go-live support model.

5. Bring management-consulting rigour to a fast-moving product environment

Build the operating documents — engagement plans, RACI matrices, risk logs, stakeholder maps, status reports — and keep them alive.
Run structured problem-solving when something goes wrong: what happened, why, what we will do differently. Write it down so the next state does not hit the same problem.
Synthesise across states. If three states are asking for the same thing, you should be the first person to notice and the one who brings it to product.

Qualifications

Must have

5–10 years of experience leading complex client-facing engagements with measurable delivery responsibility. Strong fit profiles include:
- Engagement Manager / Project Leader / Principal at BCG, Bain, McKinsey or similar organisation.
- Forward-Deployed Engagement Manager, Deployment Strategist, Technical Program Manager, or Customer Success Lead at enterprise software companies.
- Programme leaders driving large-scale government technology or public-sector transformation initiatives.
We care far more about your ability to drive outcomes through influence than about your exact title.
A demonstrated ability to earn trust with non-technical senior decision-makers — judges, civil servants, executives, board members. We will probe for this. References will matter.
Exceptional executive communication skills. You should be comfortable presenting a deployment roadmap to a Chief Justice in the morning, discussing integration blockers with NIC engineers in the afternoon, and running an internal engineering review in the evening.
Strong hypothesis-driven problem solving. You can take an ambiguous deployment challenge, break it into components, identify the critical path, and drive decisions quickly.
Strong written and verbal communication in English and Hindi. At least one additional Indian regional language is a strong plus — we deploy in courts that operate in their state language.
Operational rigour. You write things down. You follow up. You do not drop things. Your meetings have agendas and your projects have plans.
High tolerance for ambiguity and travel. Indian courts are not Silicon Valley. The infrastructure is uneven, the politics are real, and you will spend meaningful time in court complexes across the country.

Strong plus

Direct experience working with the Indian judiciary, CIS, NIC, the e-Committee, or state-level government IT rollouts.
Technical literacy — you do not need to write code, but you should be able to read an API spec, follow an architecture diagram, and push back on a vendor when something does not add up.
Prior work in legal tech, govtech, civic tech, or any environment where the customer is a public institution.
Evidence of having written playbooks, runbooks, or operating documents that other people then ran successfully — proof that you can systematise, not just execute.

What You Will Achieve in a Year

In your first year, you will have taken at least two states from cold start to live-and-stable Paperless Courts deployment. Each of those states will have a senior judicial officer who picks up the phone for Adalat because of the relationship you built. The technical stakeholders in those states will be hitting their commitments without needing to be chased, because you set up the right cadence and the right accountability early.

Internally, the state leads, forward-deployed engineers, and product folks working on Paperless Courts will route through you by default — not because you sit between them and the customer, but because you make their work easier. Engineering will know what is coming in the next 90 days because you told them. Product will be making roadmap decisions informed by a synthesised view of what every state is asking for, because you wrote it up.

By the end of the year, Adalat will no longer depend on the founders to run state-level deployments. You will have created the operating model, stakeholder relationships, governance mechanisms, and delivery playbooks that allow Paperless Courts — and the rest of Adalat's product portfolio inside those states — to scale from a handful of deployments to a national programme.