Supply Chain and Procurement Manager

About Canada Rocket Company
Canada Rocket Company is developing Canada's first medium-lift launch vehicle. We are a team of veterans from SpaceX, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, ArianeGroup, Pangea Propulsion, Tesla, MDA, and more, bringing over a century of combined launch and space systems experience back to Canada. Our mission is to provide reliable, independent access to space for Canada and its allies in a rapidly expanding global market.

Our approach is defined by pragmatic engineering:

• We we utilize a simple cycle, methane and liquid oxygen engine (Canada's largest) utilizable on multiple stages through clustering
• We lean on simple, proven technologies to reach orbit faster, avoiding the pitfalls of complex or novel designs.
• We test early and often, catching problems on the bench instead of at the pad.

Backed by over $20M in funding secured within our first four months, including the largest all-Canadian seed round in the sector and an $8.3M Department of National Defence grant, we are moving with the speed and institutional backing required to meet Canada's orbital launch needs.

About the role

We're hiring our first Supply Chain & Procurement Manager to build the foundations of how CRC buys, receives and tracks everything that goes into our hardware. The processes you design will shape how the company runs as we scale. This is a net-new, senior individual-contributor role. You'll start as a team of one, working with stakeholders across engineering, manufacturing, finance and operations.

You won't take on all of CRC's procurement yourself. Your first job is to give our Responsible Engineers (REs) the process and tools to manage their own supply chain without duplication, oversights, and coordinated across other teams for effect. After that, you'll own key strategic supplier relationships and step in when supply issues threaten the critical path.

In your first 90 days, you'll put reliable supply in place for our core materials and components. You'll set up the tracking that gives the team visibility into what's ordered and what's arriving, and become the main point of contact for our external suppliers.

How this role fits

This role supplies the vehicle side of CRC: the parts, materials and builds our engineering and manufacturing teams need, from raw metal stock to complete assemblies.

What you'll do

• Run supplier coordination (~50%). Work with new and existing suppliers for stock material, COTS components and custom builds made through partners. Keep stock levels, specs and schedules on track.
• Build and run stock and materials management (~25%). Set up the inventory and tracking system. Inspect and accept incoming goods, then sort and control them, including our supply cage.
• Partner with engineering and manufacturing (~25%). Work with the Responsible Engineers (RE) and the manufacturing team to set and improve part-selection criteria, acceptance criteria and partner outreach.
• Lead the RE side of procurement tooling. Work with our CFO as we choose and roll out a procurement system and goods/services-receipt process in Q1 2027. You'll bring the REs' pain points, so the process stays lean but controlled and produces good data on schedule, scope, cost, and risks and opportunities.
• Work across the company. Collaborate with finance and operations on payables, receivables, strategic stock and value tracking, and with admin ops on controlled goods.

These percentages will change as programs move from development into production, and demand will spike unpredictably. The best person here stays just ahead of what the team needs, but not so far ahead that the cart goes before the horse.

We'll measure success by shorter time-to-availability, zero unfilled requests for kits or the shop, and doing both while keeping total stores value down.

What you bring

Must have

• 8+ years in procurement and supply chain at a hardware-focused company.
• Experience with complex, multi-domain hardware systems.
• Hands-on knowledge of buying across many commodity types: metal stock, integrated circuits and electronics, machined parts, and complete assemblies, sourced in Canada and internationally.
• Hands-on ownership of competitive sourcing and purchase order administration through to delivery and invoice close.

• Demonstrated spend accountability: tracking commitments and actuals against a budget, forecasting, and reporting variances to people who make decisions on them.
• Comfortable reading a specification and a drawing well enough to know when a quote does not match what was asked for.
• You understand how buying for development differs from buying for production.
• You've built processes from scratch and you keep them lean. You know when a big-company process helps and when it slows the team down.
• You're comfortable as a team of one with many stakeholders, and you'd rather enable engineers than gatekeep them.

Nice to have

• SCMP, CSCP, CPSM, or equivalent designation, or progress toward one.

• Experience procuring long-lead industrial equipment such as pressure vessels, valves, switchgear, structural steel, or process piping.

• Exposure to capital budgeting, capex forecasting, or project cost control alongside a finance or PMO team.

• Familiarity with aerospace, energy, or heavy industrial supply bases.

• ERP or MRP experience, and the appetite to help select and stand one up.
• Exposure to controlled goods, ITAR, or Canadian export control regimes