Manufacturing Systems Support Engineer

About the Role

Slate is seeking a Manufacturing Systems Support Engineer to be the first line of defense for issues within the company's manufacturing technology stack. This is an entry-level role for an individual who is technically grounded, methodical under pressure, and comfortable working on the factory floor alongside operators, supervisors, software engineers, and IT personnel. The role involves diagnosing and resolving issues across MES, WMS, and CMMS, including their integrations, by reading logs, querying data, and escalating when necessary.

• This position is based at the Slate manufacturing facility in Warsaw, IN.
• Night shift hours are 7:00 pm - 3:30 am EDT.

Key Responsibilities

• Serve as the first point of contact for manufacturing system issues, triaging incoming requests from operators, supervisors, and quality engineers across MES, WMS, and CMMS.
• Diagnose software issues by reading application logs, querying databases, and tracing data flows to determine the root cause (user error, configuration, data integrity, or software defect).
• Follow established troubleshooting runbooks to resolve known issue patterns and document any identified gaps or improvements for the knowledge base.
• Escalate issues requiring code fixes to the software engineering team, providing precise escalation tickets with observations, ruled-out possibilities, and supporting data.
• Monitor system health dashboards and proactively address anomalies before they impact production.
• Analyze incident data to identify recurring patterns and high-frequency issue types, surfacing trends with supporting data to the engineering team for permanent fixes.
• Manage user administration tasks, including account setup, access provisioning, and permission changes across manufacturing system platforms.
• Support software release activities, including executing test scripts, validating deployments, and flagging regressions.
• Walk the factory floor to observe problems firsthand when context is needed for faster diagnosis.

Requirements & Tech Stack

• Technical Skills:
• 0–3 years of experience in IT support, helpdesk, technical operations, or a related role.
• Ability to read and interpret application logs to differentiate between user errors, misconfigurations, and software defects.
• Basic SQL skills for writing straightforward queries to look up records, verify data integrity, and cross-reference tables.
• Working understanding of how web-based software systems operate, including browsers, REST APIs, and databases, sufficient for tracing issues.
• Experience using an ITSM ticketing system (e.g., ServiceNow, Jira Service Management, Zendesk).
• Comfort working in both Windows and Linux environments at an operator and configuration level.
• Familiarity with monitoring or observability dashboards (e.g., Grafana, Zabbix, Datadog) is a plus.
• Basic scripting ability in Python, Bash, or similar is valued.
• How You Work:
• Methodical troubleshooter who forms hypotheses, tests them, and confirms or rules them out.
• Clear communicator under pressure, able to convey information to supervisors in plain language.
• Takes ownership of tickets through to verified closure.
• Curious about root causes and documents findings even without immediate explanation.
• Comfortable working on the active factory floor.
• Eager to learn new aspects of manufacturing systems.

Qualifications

• Associate or bachelor’s degree in information technology, Computer Science, or a related field, or equivalent hands-on experience.
• Experience in a manufacturing or industrial environment is welcomed but not required for candidates with strong fundamentals and curiosity.