Manufacturing Systems Engineer

ABOUT SLATE

At Slate, we’re building safe, reliable vehicles that people can afford, personalize and love—and doing it here in the USA as part of our commitment to reindustrialization. The spirit of DIY and customization runs throughout every element of a Slate, because people should have control over how their trucks look, feel, and represent them.

We are seeking a Manufacturing Systems Engineer who sits at the intersection of the factory floor and the software development team. This is a hands‑on engineering position that requires equal parts technical depth and business process understanding. You will write production code, own features end‑to‑end, and in the same week sit with an assembly line supervisor to understand why a process is not working and translate that into a system improvement.

We are looking for someone who is energized by solving real manufacturing problems through code, who thrives in ambiguity, and who measures success by what ships rather than what is documented.

Embed directly with manufacturing operations, quality, and logistics teams to understand their processes and build technical solutions.

Develop and maintain Go microservices, Python FastAPIs and React front ends within the FactoryOS platform, owning features from technical design through production deployment.

Translate complex, often ambiguous manufacturing requirements into clean, testable code using clean architecture.

Lead root cause analysis on production system issues, determining whether the fix is code, configuration, process, or a combination, and then delivering it.

Define and instrument key metrics for manufacturing system performance; identify improvement opportunities and build the features to capture them.

Write meaningful tests — unit, integration, and end‑to‑end — and take personal accountability for the quality of your own deliverables.

Actively participate in sprint planning, design reviews, and retrospectives as a contributing member of the team.

Partner with OT engineers, ERP and PLM teams, as well as QMS and CMMS stakeholders to ensure integration points are correctly specified and implemented.

Champion continuous improvement of both the manufacturing systems and the development process.

Document system behaviour, data flows, and operational runbooks to a standard that makes the system maintainable by anyone on the team, not just its original author.

• 3–7 years of software engineering experience with meaningful production exposure to Python and Go or a comparable statically typed language; a demonstrated ability to ramp Go/Python quickly if coming from another language such as Java or C# .NET.
• Solid React and Type Script front‑end experience, with ability to build and maintain production‑quality UI components independently without front‑end specialists to lean on.
• Working knowledge of PostgreSQL or other RDBMS: comfortable with schema design, writing performant queries, and reading execution plans.
• Familiarity with event‑driven architecture and message brokers such as NATS, Kafka, or RabbitMQ.
• Solid understanding of RESTful API design, HTTP fundamentals, and service‑to‑service communication patterns.
• Comfortable in a CI/CD environment:
  Git branching, code review, automated testing pipelines, and deployment tooling.
• Exposure to manufacturing systems — MES, WMS, QMS, CMMS, or similar — is a genuine advantage but not a barrier for a strong engineer with intellectual curiosity about how things are built.

Communicates across the room: equally comfortable presenting a technical trade‑off to a fellow engineer and explaining a system behaviour to a shift supervisor.

Turns ambiguity into action: in a greenfield environment, requirements are often incomplete. You gather information, make a reasonable call, build something, get feedback, and improve — rather than waiting for a perfect specification.

Curious about the process, not just the code: you ask why the manufacturing process works the way it does, and that curiosity produces better software decisions than any requirements…