Implementation Lead – AI-Native Merchandising & Supply Chain Planning

India (Remote) | Full-Time | Permanent | SaaS / AI Technology / Supply Chain Planning

Placed by Hotsourced – connecting top Global talent with world-class global companies The opportunity

You’ll be the company’s first implementation hire, working directly with both founders to take ownership of customer implementation and onboarding.

The company is building an AI-native merchandising and supply chain planning platform for growing consumer brands across fashion, homeware and consumer products. With 16 live customers, the business is helping brands move beyond spreadsheets to improve inventory planning, purchasing, forecasting and cash flow.

As the first implementation hire, you’ll take what the founders currently do themselves and turn it into a repeatable, scalable process. You’ll work directly with customers, understand their data and planning requirements, build their models, configure the platform and help them get meaningful value from it.

This is an opportunity to join an early-stage business where you’ll have direct exposure to the founders, customers, product and roadmap. You’ll play a meaningful role in shaping how the implementation function develops as the company grows.

The role The role sits across three essential areas: data modelling, planning logic and customer implementation. You’ll need to be comfortable working across all three, combining technical curiosity with commercial thinking and strong customer communication.

What you’ll own

1. Customer implementation

You’ll own customer onboarding from kickoff through to go-live, initially working alongside the founders before gradually taking full responsibility.

- Run customer onboarding meetings and understand business requirements.
- Translate customer needs into workable platform configurations.
- Manage implementation timelines, dependencies and customer expectations.
- Explain how the platform and underlying models work.
- Handle customer questions, challenges and pushback constructively.
- Identify practical workarounds when the platform does not currently support a requested feature.
- Ensure customers are successfully using the platform after go-live.
- Build trust with customers throughout the implementation process.

2. Data modelling & configuration You’ll work with customer data to understand how their business operates and represent it accurately within the platform.

- Design customer data structures and identify the relationships between products, variants, suppliers and purchase orders.
- Map customer spreadsheets into structured data models.
- Clean, validate and reconcile customer data.
- Identify missing, duplicated, inconsistent or invalid records.
- Configure models using AI tools and the company's internal tooling.
- Read and edit code or configuration where required.
- Investigate data inconsistencies and resolve issues.
- Ensure platform outputs reconcile with source data and reflect the customer's actual business.

3. Planning & commercial analysis You’ll work with the commercial and operational logic behind forecasting, inventory, purchasing and supply chain planning.

- Work with forecasting, seasonality, safety stock, inventory and purchasing logic.
- Understand size and colour mix, landed costs, purchase orders, margin and supplier cash flow.
- Review planning assumptions and investigate calculations that do not look right.
- Analyse historical performance and compare forecast accuracy through backtesting.
- Understand how changes in assumptions affect inventory, purchasing recommendations and cash flow.
- Trace calculations from the underlying data through to the final business output.




- Explain findings clearly and recommend commercially sensible solutions.

4. AI-assisted configuration & problem-solving The company is AI-native, and AI tools are an important part of how the team works. You won’t be expected to write everything from scratch. Instead, you’ll use AI to accelerate configuration, analysis and troubleshooting while retaining responsibility for the quality and accuracy of the output.

- Use AI tools such as Claude, ChatGPT, Claude Code, Cursor or Copilot to solve real work problems.
- Direct AI tools to build, modify, analyse and troubleshoot configurations.
- Review AI-generated code, configuration and analysis critically.
- Validate calculations, data mappings and outputs against business logic.
- Identify and correct errors rather than relying on whether something simply runs.
- Learn new tools quickly and apply them to practical implementation challenges.
- Turn repeated tasks into reusable prompts, templates, automations or AI workflows.

5. Process improvement & scalability As the first implementation hire, you’ll help establish how implementation works as the customer base grows.

- Document successful approaches, recurring challenges and lessons learned.
- Build reusable templates, mapping guides and validation checks.
- Identify opportunities to automate repetitive work.
- Reduce implementation time and effort without compromising quality.
- Develop a repeatable implementation playbook.
- Identify recurring customer requirements and product gaps.
- Communicate implementation challenges and customer insights directly to the founders.
- Contribute feedback that helps inform product improvements and the roadmap.

What success looks like in your first 90 days

By 90 days

- You’ve successfully managed at least one customer onboarding from beginning to end, with a founder reviewing rather than leading.
- Implementation time is being measured against the existing baseline and beginning to decrease.
- At least one reusable template, automation or AI workflow is actively being used.
- Customers you’ve onboarded are actively using the platform.
- You’ve started contributing to a repeatable implementation playbook.

Who we’re looking for All three areas below are essential. Being exceptionally strong in two but weak in the third is unlikely to work in this role.

1. You think in data structures

You can look beyond spreadsheet columns and understand the underlying business entities, relationships and dependencies.

For example, you understand that a purchase order can contain multiple lines, with each line relating to a particular product or product variant.

You may have worked with:

- Databases and SQL.
- Airtable, Notion or low-code platforms.
- Planning systems.
- ERP or WMS systems.
- Ecommerce platforms and internal business tools.
- Structured spreadsheets used to model business processes.

Your experience should go beyond reporting. You should have experience designing, organising or structuring data rather than simply consuming reports. 2. You use AI tools for real work

You regularly use AI tools to solve practical problems and accelerate your work.

You may have experience with:

- Claude or ChatGPT.
- Claude Code, Cursor or Copilot.
- Other AI-assisted development or productivity tools.

You’re comfortable reading and editing code or configuration, even if you’re not a software engineer.



More importantly, you understand that AI can be wrong. You validate its output against source data, calculations, business logic and real-world requirements before relying on it.

3. You’re strong with customers

You can work directly with founders, buyers, planners and operations teams to understand what they actually need.

You can

- Explain complex information in simple, clear language.
- Ask thoughtful questions and uncover underlying requirements.
- Present recommendations confidently.
- Challenge assumptions constructively.
- Handle difficult conversations calmly.
- Manage expectations and communicate limitations honestly.
- Build credibility and trust.
- Say no when necessary without damaging the relationship.

You’re comfortable balancing customer needs with what the platform can realistically deliver.

Also important

You can reason about planning logic

You don’t need to be a supply chain mathematician, but you should be comfortable understanding and sanity-checking concepts such as:

- Rolling averages and seasonality.
- Forecast accuracy and backtesting.
- Size and colour mix.
- Discontinued products.
- Safety stock and inventory.
- Purchase orders and landed costs.
- Margin and supplier cash flow.

You should be able to follow a number from its underlying data through to the final business output and identify when something doesn’t add up.

You like improving systems

You’d rather improve a process than repeatedly perform the same manual task.

You naturally ask: “How do we make this easier next time?”

You’re comfortable joining an environment where the playbook doesn’t fully exist yet and helping build it.

Nice to have

Experience in any of the following would be advantageous:

- Merchandising, buying or merchandise planning.
- Supply chain or inventory planning.
- Ecommerce operations or retail analytics.
- Shopify or Amazon.
- ERP or WMS systems and third-party logistics (3PL) data.
- Python, SQL or YAML.
- Low-code or no-code tools.
- Merchandise planning concepts such as WSSI, Open-to-Buy (OTB) or intake planning.

Backgrounds that could fit We’re particularly interested in people who have worked across both systems/data and stakeholders.

Potential backgrounds include

- Merchandise, Buying or Planning Analyst at a consumer brand.
- Ecommerce or Operations Analyst working with Shopify, inventory or 3PL data.
- Solutions Consultant or Implementation Specialist at a B2B SaaS company.
- Business or Data Analyst who has built internal tools or systems.
- Systems Analyst.
- Operations Analyst with strong technical capability.
- Consultant or analyst with a hands-on technical streak.
- Implementation skilled with strong data and analytical skills.

Your job title matters less than whether you’ve actually worked across data, systems, problem-solving and customers. Probably not for you if…
- Your strength is relationship management, while configuration and systems work have always been handled by someone else.
- You’re a developer or engineer who hasn’t worked directly with customers.
- You haven’t yet used AI tools for real work.
- Your spreadsheet experience has primarily been reporting rather than structuring or modelling data.
- You prefer following an established process rather than creating and improving one.
- You enjoy implementation management but don’t want to get into the underlying data and logic.
- You want a role where the technical team handles the build while you manage the customer relationship.

Work schedule & benefits
- Location: India – Fully Remote
- Working hours: 9:00 AM–5:00 PM GMT (2:30 PM–10:30 PM IST)
- Employment: Full-Time
- Reporting to: Founders

Compensation: 18-20 LPA

📌 Implementation & Solutions Lead (India)
🏢 hotsourced
📍 India