Deployment Strategist

Silkline•Chicago, IL

6d•$150,000 - $225,000•Hybrid

About The Position

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. The company is backed by top venture investors and has grown its customer base 5x. The founding team consists of Isaac Chambers (CEO) and Brent Shulman (CTO). In this role, you will own customers from signed contract through go-live and beyond. You will learn how a manufacturer's procurement, engineering, and finance teams operate, map their ERP, PLM, and MES data into Silkline, configure workflows, and ensure Silkline becomes their primary operational tool. You will act as the technical point person, troubleshooting issues, and identifying opportunities to improve the product based on field learnings. The role offers two potential paths: manufacturing systems implementation or forward-deployed software engineering.

Requirements

4+ years in a role where you owned customer or operational outcomes.
Strong analytical and quantitative background (e.g., engineering, CS, math, physics, economics, data science).
Ability to decompose ambiguous, messy situations into manageable parts and prioritize effectively.
Technical fluency: comfortable writing SQL, reading API documentation, debugging payloads in Postman, and interacting with engineers.
Clear writing and communication skills, capable of writing memos for executives and specs for engineers.
Customer ownership: comfortable leading meetings with VPs and managing go-live processes.
Willingness to travel frequently to customer sites.

Nice To Haves

Experience with manufacturing procurement processes (MRP, sourcing, supplier quality, receiving, 3-way match).
Hands-on experience with ERP, PLM, or MES implementation or integration.
Coding experience, particularly in TypeScript, GraphQL, or Postgres.
Background in aerospace, defense, space, or other regulated manufacturing industries.

Responsibilities

Own deployments from start to finish, including kickoff, discovery, data mapping and migration, configuration, and go-live.
Manage timelines and drive adoption of Silkline across procurement, engineering, finance, and IT departments.
Connect Silkline to customer systems (ERPs, PLMs, MES) by mapping and validating data flows.
Diagnose and resolve synchronization issues between Silkline and customer systems.
Write SQL and GraphQL queries to validate migrations, troubleshoot discrepancies, and build customer analytics.
Configure approval chains, RFQ processes, supplier onboarding, and PO lifecycles to match customer operations.
Serve as the main technical partner and point of contact after go-live, tracking adoption, outcomes, and identifying expansion opportunities.
Translate observed patterns from customer interactions into clear engineering requirements for product development.
Contribute to product development, potentially shipping code if experienced.
Develop implementation templates, data mapping guides, onboarding runbooks, and success metrics to build the deployment playbook.