Denver, Colorado, September 14, 2026 — Deep Fathom, a provider of regulatory and compliance automation solutions powered by Agentic AI, today announced that Savan Kong has joined its Advisory Board.
Kong is founder and CEO of Your Roster and was the first person to hold the Department of Defense’s customer experience officer role. He spent nearly four years at the Defense Digital Service, the Pentagon’s internal software team, building tools inside the Department. That work led to a broader mandate: improving how people experience and use technology across the enterprise.
His appointment comes as the Department reevaluates how defense suppliers demonstrate cybersecurity compliance. While CMMC Phase II has been suspended and the program is under broader review, the underlying obligation to protect covered defense information and meet NIST 800-171 requirements remains.
“What’s happening with CMMC gets at a problem I’ve spent a lot of my career working on: the difference between the outcome you need and the process you’ve built around proving it,” said Kong. “When I spent time in Deep Fathom, what stood out was the focus on making the underlying work and evidence easier to maintain, regardless of what form the assessment ultimately takes.”
Kong also advises companies on how federal agencies buy, prioritize, and define mission success through his role as a principal consultant at Deep Water Point & Associates.
At the Department of Defense, Kong directed the CXO Portfolio Management Office under the Office of the Chief Information Officer, embedding customer experience practices across Department-wide IT initiatives. He led publication of the Fulcrum IT Implementation Strategy, the Department’s framework for aligning technology investment to mission priorities, along with the performance measurement structure behind it. His work included congressional responses, Government Accountability Office and Inspector General engagements, and federal reporting on the Department’s digital transformation.
Earlier, at the Defense Digital Service, Kong led design and delivery for Project Oscar during Operation Allies Refuge in August 2021, building interfaces under extreme time pressure that supported the accelerated evacuation of more than 120,000 Afghan allies. He also designed Project Rabbit, a data-matching system for Special Immigrant Visa processing that replaced a manual, error-prone workflow and helped clear a backlog of more than 10,000 cases.
“The security standard and the machinery built around proving you meet it are two different things,” said Steven Hess, chief executive officer and co-founder of Deep Fathom. “Savan has spent his career making complicated institutional processes work better for the people who actually have to use them. That perspective is directly relevant to what we are building.”
A product career spanning more than two decades sits underneath Kong’s government work. At Rebellion Defense, he served as head of ISR and platform and later general manager, directing development of an intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance product and standing up an emerging product line. Earlier roles included Amazon, healthcare software company Kareo, and Redfin, where he co-authored a patent for interactive map-based property search during the launch of the first online real estate brokerage in the United States.
For the defense industrial base, Deep Fathom delivers continuous readiness against NIST 800-171 and evolving assessment and certification requirements. Evidence is captured as work happens, giving teams a current view of what is complete, what requires attention, and what can be substantiated when an assessment, self-attestation, or government review requires it.
Kong has worked with the founders over the past year, including sessions on product architecture and go-to-market strategy, and will advise Deep Fathom on government acquisition, go-to-market strategy, and product and user experience.
Kong joins Deep Fathom Advisory Board members Rob Bair, who advises on national security; Rich Vorwaller, who advises on product and security architecture; and Tanya Loh, who advises on positioning and go-to-market strategy.
Learn more at www.deepfathom.ai and follow Deep Fathom on LinkedIn.
About Deep Fathom
Deep Fathom helps organizations continuously meet, maintain, and prove cybersecurity and regulatory requirements. For the defense industrial base, its platform keeps NIST 800-171 readiness, evidence, and remediation work current as assessment and certification requirements evolve. Its Agentic AI orchestration connects the work being done to the evidence needed to substantiate it, reducing administrative burden, rework, and dependence on point-in-time compliance exercises.