Product Design Engineer

Supply Chain Analyst — Grounded Detroit, MI (in-person) About Grounded 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. The Role 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. What you'd actually do 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 What we're looking for 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 Compensation Competitive base salary + meaningful equity in Grounded + comprehensive health insurance Why this role is different At a bigger company, procurement is a back‑office function executing requisitions someone else specced. Here you own supply chain as a strategic discipline — what you can source shapes what we build. You'll work directly with engineers and leadership, make real trade‑off calls across a dozen wildly different verticals, and build the function from scratch rather than inherit a rigid one. #J-18808-Ljbffr