Forward Deployed Engineer (Customer Success)

Remote (US) · 10–20% travel · HQ in Atlanta, GA

StartProto is the cloud-native, AI-native manufacturing operating system replacing the aging on-prem systems most shops still run on. We cover the full quote-to-cash workflow in one platform — RFQs and quotes, sales orders, jobs, routings, BOMs, purchasing, inventory, scheduling, shipping, and invoicing — giving manufacturers real-time visibility and end-to-end traceability. Founded in 2020 and headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, we serve small-to-mid CNC machine shops, Swiss shops, and fabricators (typically 20–300 employees), including a growing aerospace and defense segment on our ITAR-ready AWS GovCloud deployment.

We're hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer (you'll also hear us say Solutions Engineer — same job) to lead onboarding and implementation for new manufacturing customers and to own an ongoing book of accounts. The core of the work is translating a shop's physical world into a digital workflow: understanding how they actually quote, build, buy, and ship, then mapping that into StartProto and training their team until it's how they run the business.

You'll start by working alongside our two current Customer Success Engineers, pick up your own accounts, and grow into leading new onboardings end to end. This is a customer-facing engineering hybrid: part trainer, part process consultant, part technical problem-solver. If you're strong in front of customers, there's room to take on our largest and most complex accounts.

You will lead onboarding and implementation for new customers — kickoff, process mapping, data migration from legacy systems (JobBoss, E2, spreadsheets), configuration, and go-live

• You will train customer teams across the shop — owners, planners, buyers, material handlers, and operators — and explain concepts like lead time and work-in-progress in plain language to people who have never used a modern system
  

• You will split your time roughly 60% training and 40% closing the gap: finding where a customer's workflow and the system don't yet meet, and bridging it with a custom report, a custom page, an import, or a better process
  

• You will own ongoing relationships through regular check-ins, office hours, quarterly business reviews, and our in-app support chat, driving adoption module by module (sales, engineering, procurement, shop floor)
  

• You will be a technical advocate for the product and its AI — showing skeptical manufacturers why the AI assistant is a useful tool rather than a threat, and helping them put it to work
  

• You will decide when a request is a one-off you can solve yourself with AI tooling and when it's a real product gap, then record feature requests and bugs clearly so product and engineering can act on them
  

• You will respond to the occasional "code red," including getting on a plane to a customer's plant to be the voice of the product on site

Must have

• You communicate clearly and have the EQ to earn trust on a shop floor and in an owner's office — we weight this above domain expertise
  

• You learn software fast and can tell a story with it; our interview process includes exploring a sandbox account and demoing StartProto back to the team
  

• You are process-oriented: you can watch how work gets done, map it, and spot what's broken
  

• 3+ years in a customer-facing technical role (customer success, implementation, solutions or sales engineering, technical support) or hands-on manufacturing/operations experience
  

• You use AI tools (Claude, Claude Code, or similar) daily and know how to make what you build with them reliable
  

• You are comfortable working with data — CSV imports, nested bills of materials, exports — and tracking down why the numbers don't match
  

• You work well remotely, manage your own calendar across many accounts, and stay calm when a customer is having a bad day
  

• US work authorization required; this position can be done remotely from the US with 10–20% travel to customer sites
  

Nice to have

• Manufacturing background — manufacturing, industrial, or quality engineering; production planning; purchasing; or inventory/warehouse operations
  

• Experience implementing or administering an ERP/MES (JobBoss, E2, ProShop, Fulcrum, Odoo, NetSuite)
  

• Python or scripting skills for imports and automation — not a day-to-day requirement, but our team leans on it
  

• Experience creating training content — videos, guides, webinars
  

• Familiarity with aerospace and defense requirements (ITAR, DFARS, traceability and lot/serial tracking)