A mess - Anonymous employee Pole Star Employee Review

The culture is fantastic. Great place to work. A startup feel with opportunity to work with AWS

Some legacy products need to be eliminated

Talented, mission‑focused colleagues; intriguing maritime‑intelligence and defense work; flexible global teams; supportive immediate managers; strong learning curve for anyone unfamiliar with the domain, however.

PE ownership creates a strong “quarterly EBITDA” bias. Valuation metrics dominate, and security‑modernization budgets are chronically under‑funded. Cybersecurity sat under the Defense Line of Business (LOB) with no autonomous budget or official enterprise mandate, so controls that affect non-Defense systems were regularly deferred. Compliance gaps lingered, remediation backlogs grew, monitoring coverage stayed shallow, and audit readiness slipped further behind. These structural constraints—not capability—ultimately blocked meaningful risk reduction and made the program appear ineffective.