FIRST ORDER EFFECTS

Supply Chain Analyst

Infrastructure for the Autonomous Era · First in. First up.

On-site · Austin, TX

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Schedules don't slip in our shop. They slip in someone else's queue - a quote that sat four days, a part that shipped Friday instead of Monday, a vendor who needed one more reminder. You are the person who finds those weeks and takes them back. This is an entry level role: we'll teach you the systems, you bring the relentlessness.

Who We Are

First Order Effects (FOE) is building America's Infrastructure Prime for the robotic era. Autonomous ships, drones, and robots are rewriting how the world moves, fights, and builds - but none of them work without infrastructure to power them, connect them, and launch and recover them. That's what we build.

We've Built Cutting Edge Systems at Legendary Companies

Our team comes from SpaceX, Anduril, Saronic, Lockheed Skunk Works, Forterra, and Fuse Energy. Before founding FOE, we built satellite ground stations that closed a national comms gap in days, deployed multi-megawatt power systems at commercial speed, and shipped autonomous surface vessels into Navy fleet production. We've built infrastructure at lightspeed before - now we're applying that playbook to an entire company.

The Role

Buy well. Run quotes against each other, find the real price, and negotiate standing preferred-pricing agreements so we stop renegotiating the same part every quarter.
Own the paperwork end to end: purchase orders, invoice scheduling, pre-delivery coordination, and the resale and exemption certificate back-and-forth nobody else wants.
Close every open loop. Vendors owe us ship dates, drawings, certs, and confirmations. You track all of it and clear it before it turns into a delay.
Pull dates left. Treat a quoted lead time as an opening offer, not a fact. We once pushed a single supplier hard enough to pull two months out of a program timeline - that was heroics, and this role is how it becomes routine.
Some of this job is genuinely unglamorous. You will spend real hours on tax certificates, invoice schedules, and calling a vendor for the third time about a ship date they already promised twice. We're not going to pretend otherwise. What we will promise is that the unglamorous parts are load-bearing: when a container of cells lands two weeks early because you wouldn't let it go, that shows up in hardware on the water. Very few people get to move something that real right out of school.

What You'll Do

Hold hundreds of open items in a system nobody has to check behind you. Detail and organization aren't a bonus here; they're the job.
Pick up the phone. Much of this role is calls - to reps, expeditors, and shipping desks - and it takes someone who can be pleasant and immovable in the same sentence.
Read a bill of materials and work directly with the engineers who wrote it.
Bring a STEM degree - engineering, physics, chemistry, math, or anything else that taught you to reason carefully about parts and numbers. Which one matters less than whether you can.

What We're Looking For

0-2 years of experience. New grads encouraged.
Evidence you can run something other people depend on: a shop or expediting job, a lab where you owned ordering, a club budget that was actually a budget, a family business you helped keep straight.
Spreadsheet fluency, and the instinct to turn a spreadsheet into a system before it becomes a mess.
Relentless attention to detail. This role requires juggling dozens of open items at once. None of them can slip so you will have to organize, prioritize, and keep track of the status of many things at once.
Any exposure to procurement, ERP or MRP, or defense sourcing (DFARS, ITAR-aware) it a bonus.

Compensation

$50,000–$100,000 base + equity + benefits.

ITAR requirement

To conform to U.S. Government export regulations (ITAR/EAR), applicants must be a U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident, or protected individual as defined by 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3). Candidates must be eligible to obtain and maintain a U.S. security clearance; active clearance not required.

FOE is an Equal Opportunity Employer; employment with FOE is governed on the basis of merit, competence and qualifications and will not be influenced in any manner by race, color, religion, gender, national origin/ethnicity, veteran status, disability status, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, mental or physical disability or any other legally protected status.

Sovereignty is built, not declared — come build it with us.

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