Forward Deployed Engineer

The companies building satellites, launch vehicles, reactors, and robots are mostly limited by their supply chains, not their engineering. A single late part can hold up a launch. Buyers chase suppliers over email and spreadsheets, while the ERP shows a different story from what’s actually happening on the shop floor. Silkline is building the AI operating system for procurement. Hardware manufacturers in aerospace, defense, space, energy, and robotics use Silkline to run RFQs, POs, and supplier communication, connected to the systems they already run on: ERP, PLM, and MES. We’re backed by top venture investors and have grown our customer base 5x. The founding team is Isaac Chambers (CEO, 3x founder, ex-Deloitte) and Brent Shulman (CTO, engineering leader, ex-Palantir and Pave).

The Role

In practice, you’ll own customers from signed contract through go-live and beyond. You’ll learn how a manufacturer’s procurement, engineering, and finance teams actually work. Then you’ll map their ERP, PLM, and MES data into Silkline, configure workflows that fit, and stay with them until Silkline is how they run. You’ll be the technical person in the room. When a customer encounters a blocker or a PO isn’t syncing, you’ll find out why and fix it. When you see the same problem at three customers, you turn it into product. Much of what Silkline becomes will come from what you learn in the field.

Two Paths Into This Role

Two kinds of backgrounds can be successful in this role:

1. Manufacturing systems implementer. You’ve spent years implementing, configuring, and maintaining ERP, PLM, or MES systems at a manufacturer, integrator, or consultancy, along with the processes around them. You know how a part moves from BOM to PO to receipt to inventory, and where workflows and data break along the way. You don’t need to be a software engineer, but you’re very comfortable with queries and data.
2. Forward deployed software engineer. You’ve worked as an FDE, solutions engineer, or customer-facing engineer and shipped production code and integrations in front of customers. You may not know manufacturing yet, but you learn domains quickly and like messy, real-world data.

What You’ll Do

• Own deployments from start to finish. Run kickoff, discovery, data mapping and migration, configuration, and go-live. Manage the timeline and get procurement, engineering, finance, and IT to adopt Silkline.
• Connect Silkline to the customer’s systems. Map and validate data flows between Silkline and three-letter systems: ERPs (NetSuite, Microsoft D365, SAP, Epicor, etc.), PLMs (Arena, Teamcenter, Duro), and MES (ION, Manufacturo, Boltline). Diagnose sync issues and resolve them.
• Work in the data. Write SQL and GraphQL queries to validate migrations, troubleshoot discrepancies, and build the analytics customers use to measure the impact on spend, lead times, and supplier performance.
• Design workflows. Configure approval chains, RFQ processes, supplier onboarding, and PO lifecycles to match how each customer operates, and push back when their current process is the problem.
• Be the customer’s technical partner. Stay the main point of contact after go-live. Track adoption and outcomes, find expansion opportunities, and flag risk early.
• Bring what you learn back to product. Turn patterns you see across customers into clear engineering requirements. If you code, ship some of it yourself.
• Build the playbook. Our deployment process is still being written, and you’ll write it: implementation templates, data mapping guides, onboarding runbooks, and success metrics.

Spreadsheets, ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Product Lifecycle Management, Operating Systems, Robotics, Request for Proposals (RFP), Purchasing/Procurement, Aerospace and Defense, Finance, * 4+ years in one of the two paths above

• Strong engineering background, preferred in fields such as Computer Science, Mathematics, Software Engineering, Physics, and Data Science.
• Strong coder, especially with shown proficiency with our stack (TypeScript, React, Next.js, GraphQL, Postgres)
• A working understanding of APIs: you can read API docs, test endpoints in Postman, and debug auth and payload issues
• Comfort owning a customer relationship, from running a meeting with a VP of Supply Chain to managing a go-live that’s slipping
• Willingness to travel to customer sites as needed, * Strong SQL. You can write joins, aggregations, and validation queries without looking things up. GraphQL experience, or the ability to pick it up quickly.
• Experience with manufacturing procurement processes such as MRP, sourcing, supplier quality, receiving, and 3-way match
• Hands-on experience implementing, configuring, or integrating ERP, PLM, or MES systems, or shipping customer-facing integrations as an engineer
• Experience building reports or analytics from operational data
• Background in aerospace, defense, space, or other regulated manufacturing
• Consulting or deployment strategist background (for example, Palantir, Deloitte, Accenture, or an ERP partner firm)

• The base pay range for this role is $150,000 - $225,000 per year.
• The equity range for this role is .15% - .25%

Individuals of all genders, races, sexual orientations, nationalities, abilities, veteran statuses, and educational backgrounds are strongly encouraged to apply. Currently, we do not sponsor applicants for work visas. Because this role touches ITAR-controlled and CUI data, you must be a US citizen, lawful permanent resident, or otherwise qualify as a “US person” under ITAR (22 CFR 120.62).

• You’ll see your work in the real world. The deployments you run will affect whether real hardware gets built and shipped on schedule.
• You’ll shape the company. You’ll be one of our first hires in this function, working directly with the founders and an elite software engineering team. Your playbook becomes the team’s playbook.
• You’ll see the whole picture. Few jobs let you see how a manufacturer’s engineering, procurement, finance, and suppliers actually connect. This one does, across many companies at once.
• You can grow into leading the team. There’s a clear path to leading our Forward Deployed / Customer Engineering team as we scale.