Supply Chain Analyst

Grounded RV•Detroit, MI

13d•Onsite

About The Position

Grounded is a 25-person Detroit-based startup building modular electric platforms for specialty vehicles. We take cab chassis from OEMs like Ford and Harbinger and build configurable vehicle systems on top, serving mobile healthcare, RVs, command centers, food and beverage, pet care, and more. Our customers include Colgate, Nokia, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, and Portland PD. We've raised ~$5M in VC funding and are shipping vehicles in market today. We also build our own software: a mobile app, fleet dashboard, and onboard computer system that lets customers monitor and control vehicle systems remotely. We design, fabricate, and assemble everything in-house at our facility in Corktown. We're hiring a Supply Chain Analyst to own sourcing as a real discipline at Grounded. Every vehicle we build is assembled from hundreds of bought parts and materials — metals, composites, electrical components, fabricated parts — and today sourcing them is largely ad hoc: an engineer picks a material, someone scrambles to find a supplier, and cost and lead time get discovered late. You'll own that whole problem: researching suppliers and materials, finding the right material for each use case, and bringing cost, durability, and lead time into the decision before a design is locked. This is fundamentally a bridge role between our product and engineering orgs. You'll be the person who sits between what engineering wants to build and what the supply base can actually deliver — on what timeline, at what cost, and at what quality — and who feeds that reality back into how we design and price vehicles.

Requirements

3+ years in supply chain, procurement, sourcing, or purchasing — ideally for a physical or manufactured product
Strong at supplier research and negotiation; you know how to find, qualify, and get the best out of a vendor
Comfortable on the engineering side — you can read a spec or BOM, talk materials with engineers, and reason about cost / durability / lead-time trade-offs
Analytical and organized; you can build sourcing data and process where none exists
Excellent communicator who can bridge product, engineering, and suppliers
Startup or small-company experience strongly preferred — you own ambiguity and move fast

Nice To Haves

Experience sourcing for automotive, EV, or commercial/industrial hardware
Working knowledge of materials (metals, composites, electrical components) and common manufacturing processes
Experience standing up procurement processes or working in an ERP/MRP system

Responsibilities

Research, qualify, and manage suppliers across categories — raw materials, components, electrical, and fabricated parts — and build the relationships that get us better cost, lead time, and priority
Partner with engineers to select materials and components for each use case, optimizing the right trade-off — cost, durability, weight, lead time, availability — depending on the application
Own procurement end to end: RFQs, quotes, negotiation, purchase orders, and supplier performance
Drive down cost, lead time, and supply risk — find second sources and alternatives, and flag single points of failure before they bite us
Bridge product and engineering: translate design requirements into sourcing decisions, and push supplier, cost, and lead-time realities back into the design conversation
Build the supply chain function from the ground up — vendor lists, pricing and lead-time benchmarks, and the process for how Grounded sources parts as we scale
Work daily with engineers, the shop floor, and our manufacturing OS, where parts, vendors, and POs live