Forward Deploy / Customer Success Manager — Procurement

Location: Redwood City, CA (In-person, 5 days/week)
Experience: Deep experience in CPG procurement/sourcing
Company: Waystation AI

About Waystation AI

Waystation is building the operating system for procurement in consumer packaged goods (CPG).

Today, ingredient and packaging sourcing still runs through inboxes, PDFs, and spreadsheets. It's slow, opaque, and costly. Waystation replaces that chaos with an AI-powered procurement platform that creates structure, visibility, and leverage — without forcing suppliers into portals.

The result: real ROI. One customer saved over $200,000 in the first three months, paying for their annual contract in the first 30 days.

Waystation is led by repeat founder Ryan Caldbeck (previously founded CircleUp) and backed by Founder Collective, Homebrew, Slow Ventures, and 87 Capital. We have paying customers, real usage, and a product that works.

The Role

This is a forward-deployed customer success role — closer to an embedded operator than a traditional account manager.

Our customers are mid-market food, beverage, supplement, and pet food companies running complex sourcing operations: hundreds of suppliers, thousands of SKUs, RFPs that decide a year of margin. You won't manage these relationships from a dashboard. You'll embed in their procurement, QA, and R&D workflows, learn their world inside out, and translate Waystation into measurable outcomes for the people doing the work.

You bring procurement fluency they respect. You take the customer relationship off the founder's plate and own it. And you turn "we bought the software" into "this changed how our team works" — because in our world, value is created inside the customer's workflow, in real time, by someone who can bridge the product and their operating model.

If you've run sourcing inside a CPG company — or you're a CS operator who's spent real time in supply chain — this is the seat where that expertise becomes leverage.

What You'll Do

• Embed early and own the rollout. Configure workflows, align onboarding to how each team actually operates, and drive real usage from day one — not check-ins from the sidelines.

• Own customer outcomes, not status updates. Take whole problems off our plate and close them: activation gaps, data issues, workflow friction, the things standing between a customer and the value they bought.

• Drive activation and value realization. Activation is a count of humans changing their behavior — not seats sold. Get the right users live, get supplier email flowing through Waystation, and make sure structured data is being acted on, not sitting unread.

• Prove impact in the customer's own words. Quantify time saved, errors caught, supplier issues resolved, RFQ cycles compressed — and have that story locked before every renewal conversation.

• Be the translation layer. Bridge the gap between what the product can do and what a sourcing, QA, or regulatory team needs. Sit credibly with procurement directors and with R&D.

• Build leverage through tooling. Use automation and AI agents to scale yourself across a growing book — turning playbooks into repeatable systems, not manual labor.

• Feed the product. Capture the friction and the wins, and turn them into a sharper product and a tighter CS motion.

What We're Looking For

We care more about judgment, customer obsession, and a defined edge than a perfect resume.

You're a strong fit if you:

• Are genuinely customer-obsessed. You're energized by making customers successful — and you treat their success as the goal, not a means to your own brand.

• Have a sharp, defined superpower. Generalists who thrive early aren't evenly good at everything — they have one edge that makes them the go-to person. You know yours and can prove it with outcomes.

• Own things end-to-end. You take messy things start-to-finish and close them without being asked.

• Bring procurement or supply-chain depth. You understand RFPs, supplier management, specs, COAs, and the rhythm of a sourcing team — or you've earned that fluency adjacent to it. CPG context is a strong plus.

• Learn fast and love it. You get excited by what you don't yet know and close the gap fast — picking up product, customer, and domain quickly enough to outrun the company's growth.

• Have proven grit. You've pushed through long, ambiguous, demoralizing stretches — the kind where the outcome wasn't guaranteed and quitting was the easy option — and come out the other side.

• Build leverage. You use tools, automation, and agents to scale yourself — show us what you've made.

• Will plant a flag and stay. You're looking to own something through the messy middle — not treat the seat as a rung on a personal ladder.

• Want to be in the room. In person, close to founders and customers, solving problems together.

What Success Looks Like (First 6–12 Months)

• Customers you own are activated — the right people are in the product, weekly, completing real work.

• You can articulate quantified impact for each account in the customer's own language, ready for any renewal conversation.

• Renewals and expansion in your book are de-risked because the value is visible, not assumed.

• The founder is out of the day-to-day on your accounts — you own the relationship and the outcomes.

• You've turned repeated work into tooling and playbooks the whole CS team uses.

Values

• We are reliable, credible, and authentic

• We are solution-oriented

• We are proud of our work, our customers, and ourselves

What We Offer

• Competitive base salary + meaningful equity — real ownership, with upside tied directly to the outcomes you drive

• Hands-on work with a repeat founder & CEO — and the customers themselves; this is a front-row seat to how an AI-native company gets built

• A real product with real ROI — you'll prove value that's measurable, which makes every customer conversation more honest and more rewarding

• A defining seat in a new category of role — forward-deployed CS is how AI-native companies win; you'll help define what it means here

• Full health, dental, and vision coverage

• Unlimited vacation — we care about outcomes, not hours

• An in-person team that values craft and ambition