Forward Deployed Design Lead — Planning

Avathon is the leading Industrial AI autonomy platform, helping customers across heavy industries — energy, mining, manufacturing, aerospace, defense, and logistics — accelerate the journey toward autonomous operations. Our platform is built on a Computational Knowledge Graph foundation that contextualizes and connects operational data across siloed systems, bringing together time series, structured, unstructured, and machine vision data to power AI-driven applications in asset performance management, supply chain intelligence, visual AI, and global trade management. 

With capabilities spanning digital twins, normal behavior modeling, natural language processing, and computer vision, Avathon delivers real-time predictive intelligence and agentic decision-making at industrial scale. 

The Forward Deployed Design Lead — Planning is embedded directly with customer planning teams as the primary experience and implementation owner for Avathon's Planning deployments, starting with integrated demand planning. You live at the intersection of supply chain planning expertise and experience design, responsible for configuring, implementing, and continuously improving how demand planners, supply planners, and S&OP leaders actually use Avathon's platform and its AI planning agents day to day.

You will spend Monday through Thursday with client planning teams, in demand reviews and S&OP meetings, and in working sessions — translating real planning processes into configured solutions, designing the workbenches and exception workflows planners will rely on every cycle, and driving adoption from go-live through steady-state operations. Fridays are typically remote for synthesis, documentation, and collaboration with Avathon's Planning product and engineering teams.

Key Responsibilities

Planning Implementation & Configuration

• Own end-to-end implementation of Avathon's Planning product at client sites — configuring product and location hierarchies, demand segmentation, forecast models and parameters, planning horizons, and time buckets to match each customer's planning process
• Lead functional configuration of demand planning: statistical and ML forecasting, demand sensing, collaborative demand review, consensus planning, forecast value-add (FVA), and bias and accuracy analytics
• Configure the flow from the consensus demand plan into supply decisions — demand-supply matching, inventory positioning, allocation, and S&OP scenarios — so planners can see the trade-offs
• Set up and validate integrations between Avathon's platform and client ERP, MES, and PLM systems (SAP, Oracle) — ensuring sales history, orders, BOMs, inventory, and master data flow accurately
• Bring B2B demand signals into the plan — customer contracts, project forecasts, production schedules, commodity indices, and macro indicators — validating their quality before they feed the forecast
• Conduct go-live readiness assessments — backtesting forecast accuracy and verifying configuration, user access, data completeness, and integration health before each deployment milestone

Experience Design & Workflow Mapping

• Lead onsite discovery sessions — interviewing demand planners, supply planners, sales, finance, and S&OP leaders to map the as-is planning cycle and define the future-state experience on Avathon's platform
• Design how planners supervise, collaborate with, and override AI planning agents that generate forecasts, flag exceptions, and recommend supply actions — with clear explanations and a full audit trail
• Produce implementation-grade design artifacts: annotated screen flows, planner workbench layouts, exception and alert rules, review and approval workflows, and role-based view specifications — directly actionable by the engineering team
• Design and validate the end-user experience within Avathon's Planning product: forecast review grids, exception queues, scenario comparisons, and S&OP dashboards — optimized for planners managing thousands of item-location combinations
• Facilitate working sessions with client stakeholders to validate designs against real planning cycles (weekly demand reviews, monthly S&OP) — iterating on planner feedback before configuration is finalized
• Ensure designs account for the realities of planning work: cycle deadlines, cross-functional handoffs, entrenched spreadsheet habits, and the trust planners need before accepting machine-generated forecasts

Client Engagement & Delivery

• Act as the day-to-day client contact for all design, configuration, and adoption activities — building trusted working relationships with planners, supply chain leaders, and S&OP owners
• Facilitate weekly client working sessions, design reviews, and sprint demos that keep stakeholders aligned, engaged, and confident in the deployment's progress
• Maintain implementation documentation — configuration logs, integration specs, training materials, and acceptance test records — that serve as the client's operational handbook post go-live
• Partner with Avathon's Planning product team to turn repeated deployment requests into reusable product requirements, and contribute configuration patterns to delivery playbooks that accelerate future implementations
• Identify opportunities to expand Avathon's footprint within accounts — additional product lines, sites, user populations, or adjacent planning modules (supply, inventory, S&OP) — and surface them to the engagement director

Preferred Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in supply chain planning software implementation, professional services, or a UX/design role embedded in client-facing delivery — with hands-on configuration and deployment ownership
• Demonstrated demand planning domain knowledge: statistical and ML forecasting, demand sensing, segmentation, FVA, accuracy and bias metrics (MAPE, WMAPE, bias), and how demand plans drive supply, inventory, and S&OP decisions
• Hands-on experience implementing or configuring planning platforms: Blue Yonder, o9, Kinaxis, SAP IBP, Oracle SCM, RELEX, Anaplan, Aera, Coupa Supply Chain (LLamasoft), or similar
• Familiarity with ERP, MES, and PLM data (SAP, Oracle) and how it flows into planning — comfortable using SQL and Excel to validate sales history, orders, BOMs, inventory, and master data
• Strong UX and design execution skills — able to produce annotated wireframes, workbench layouts, and workflow diagrams that engineering teams can build directly from (Figma preferred)
• Experience designing human-in-the-loop workflows for AI or ML recommendations — explainability, overrides, approvals, and audit trails
• Proven ability to facilitate discovery sessions and working meetings with mixed audiences of planners, sales, finance, and supply chain leadership — translating planning complexity into clear, actionable design decisions
• Experience designing and delivering end-user training programs for enterprise planning software
• Comfort with agile delivery rhythms: sprint planning, backlog grooming, and iterating rapidly based on user feedback in live client environments
• Excellent written communication — able to produce configuration documentation, SOPs, and training guides that planners with varying technical backgrounds can follow independently

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Industrial Engineering, Operations Research, Supply Chain Management, Computer Science, Industrial Design, or a related field
• Experience working in or closely with industrial B2B supply chains — manufacturing, mining, energy, or aerospace — is highly valued
• Willingness and ability to travel up to 80%; based in Pleasanton, CA or Austin, TX

Compensation & Benefits

• California Base Salary: $170,000 - $200,000
• Equity in the form of stock options
• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision coverage
• 401(k) participation
• Generous PTO and company holidays
• All travel expenses covered per Avathon policy