Forward Deployed Engineer - Supply Chain
Posted
Summary
A hybrid customer-facing engineering role at Optiply: you sit with purchasing teams at e-commerce/retail customers in NL and Belgium, translate their purchasing rules into automated workflows using SQL, Python and low-code tools, analyze inventory data, and help onboard accounts on Optiply's AI-driven supply chain/procurement platform.
Optiply is the AI-native platform transforming how e-commerce, retail and wholesale businesses approach supply chain optimization. Our supply chain agents automate procurement end-to-end, from demand forecasting to purchase order execution, resulting in 32% less inventory, 80% less manual work and dramatically higher product availability.
We’re not building a software tool; we’re enabling organizational transformation. Buyers go from spending entire days on purchasing decisions to having intelligent agents handle routine orders while they focus on strategic partnerships and growth. CFOs see immediate cash flow improvements. Procurement leaders see their teams work smarter, not harder.
Forward deployed engineers work where the problem is: with the customer. Ours work in supply chain. You sit with a purchasing team, understand how they really buy, and build the logic that makes Optiply work for them, often in the same week.
This isn’t a pure software engineering role. You don’t need to write production code; you need to understand supply chain deeply and be able to build with SQL, Python and low-code tools. Combined MOQs, container shipments, promotions, phase-outs, multi-store setups, suppliers with very different lead times: you design the logic, build it, and make sure it keeps working.
You’ll report to Sander van den Broek, co-founder, and work side by side with our supply chain team.
Build & Solve
- Custom Workflows: Translate non-standard purchasing rules into automated workflows using SQL, Python and other tools
- Complex Analyses: Dig into customer data to answer the questions that move real money: cash flow, OTIF, container planning, service levels, deadstock. Your best prototypes can become product features.
- Data & Integrations: Find out why data in Optiply doesn’t match a customer’s ERP, WMS or webshop (Exact, AFAS, NetSuite, Picqer, Monta, Shopify and more). Work with our integration team on the fix and decide what’s a workflow job and what’s an integration job.
- Account Health: Track health KPIs per customer, such as service level, on-time/in-full, advice adoption and deadstock.
- Automate Customer Success: Build and improve the AI agents and automations behind our CS process, so the team spends its time on customers, not admin.
With Customers
- Improvement Sessions & QBRs: Sit with purchasers, supply chain managers and finance to understand how they really work, show results and agree on what’s next.
- On Site: Visit customers across the Netherlands and Belgium to kick off complex setups. Build relationships with decision makers before there’s a problem, not after.
- From Meeting to Solution: Take a customer’s problem out of the meeting room, turn it into a live solution, and follow up until it works.
- Sales & Onboarding Support: Join business case meetings and complex onboardings as the supply chain expert in the room.
You get a kick out of solving problems standard software can’t, and you’d rather build the fix yourself than write a ticket about it. You’re as comfortable in a SQL query as in a room with a customer’s purchasing team.
- Supply Chain Know-how: 3+ years in a supply chain, purchasing, inventory or technical consulting role. You understand service levels, ABC/XYZ, EOQ, MOQs, lot sizes, lead times, safety stock and forecasting, and how they play out in practice.
- Education: Bachelor’s degree (HBO or WO) in Industrial Engineering & Management, Logistics, Supply Chain Management or a related quantitative field. A Master’s, e.g. in Operations Management & Logistics, is a plus.
- Builder Mindset: You’re comfortable with SQL and have worked with automation or low-code tools like or you’re eager to master them. You understand APIs and how data moves between systems.
- Agentic Mindset: You use AI tools every day and think about how agents can replace manual work, for us and for our customers.
- Customer Skills: You explain complex logic in plain language, listen well and build trust quickly.
- Languages: Fluent in Dutch and English (mandatory).
- Competitive salary
- Free lunch at the office
- Training and development opportunities
- Hybrid work model and flexible schedule
- Proactive career management
- Up to 1 month of “work from anywhere”
- Bike plan
- Annual company gathering
- Thematic events (dinners, karting, boat trips, etc.)
- Friday drinks