Auger Just Raised $50M With 130 People. The Ex-Amazon S-Team Map Is the Playbook.
Dave Clark's Auger closed a $50M Series B on July 9, 2026. The hire profile he needs has only 163 US profiles. Here is the alumni map that works instead.
Dave Clark just raised $50M for Auger and told the press the money funds "more sales and solutions engineers next to the enterprises that want them." That role, in the way Clark means it, does not exist as a LinkedIn title. If you are sourcing for Auger or any competitor chasing autonomous supply chain, the map you need is not a keyword filter. It is an org chart Clark spent 23 years building at Amazon.
What Auger actually announced on July 9, 2026
Auger closed a $50M Series B led by Eclipse with Oak HC/FT participating, taking total funding to $150M at roughly 2x its Series A valuation, with 130 employees and three named enterprise customers. The company is headquartered in Bellevue, not the Bay Area, and its product runs on Azure and ships as a supply chain partner on Microsoft Fabric.
The disclosed customer list is short but load-bearing:
- Meta Reality Labs, for the VR/AR hardware supply chain
- Fanatics, where roughly 85% of the decisions Auger manages happen autonomously, with a stated goal of pushing that into the mid-90s
- Kimberly-Clark, a legacy CPG account with plant-level integration
Clark told GeekWire the round funds new products plus embedded solutions engineers. He also said he wants half of US GDP flowing through Auger's platform by 2030. Neither claim is a normal Series B talking point. Both tell you exactly who he plans to hire, and it is not who shows up when you type "AI supply chain engineer" into LinkedIn.
Why the obvious LinkedIn search fails
The role Clark is scaling has no clean title match, which is why every recruiter working an Auger-shaped brief is fishing in the wrong pool. Two queries in Refolk's index of professional profiles show the shape of the problem.
| Segment | US profiles | What it actually contains |
|---|---|---|
| Literal "Supply Chain Engineer" title | 472 | Ops engineers at Intel, C.H. Robinson, IBM, HP, Walmart, Apple, CEVA |
| Solutions/Sales Engineer + "supply chain" keyword | 163 | Wipro, UPS, o9 Solutions, Blue Yonder, JDA, Nestlé |
| Ratio (wrong pool vs. right-shaped pool) | 2.9x | The "obvious" title is 3x larger and off-target |
The 472-profile "Supply Chain Engineer" pool is almost entirely industrial engineers optimizing conveyor lines and DC layouts. Twenty-four of the top 25 employers are traditional manufacturers. Almost none of them have shipped an agent, tuned an LLM, or touched an OR solver in a modern stack.
The 163-profile "solutions engineer with supply chain context" pool is closer, but still wrong for Auger. Most of it sits at Wipro doing SAP integrations or at Blue Yonder demoing legacy planning software. That work is adjacent to Auger's problem, not the same problem.
The hire Clark actually needs is a three-attribute intersection
The Auger solutions engineer sits on top of ERP, WMS, TMS, and demand planning; wires them together with agents and optimization models; and gets held to a number like "push Fanatics from 85% autonomous decisioning to 94%." That is three separate skills stacked on one person:
- Enterprise ops fluency (ran a fulfillment center, a category, or an inbound network)
- Model and agent literacy (can modify an optimization model or an agent chain, not just call an API)
- Azure and Microsoft Fabric depth, because that is Auger's stack
There is no title for that intersection. There is, however, a very specific alumni graph that produces it.
The Dave Clark alumni map is the actual sourcing pool
The real Auger Series B hiring pool is defined by former reporting line, not job title. Clark's career is a 23-year Amazon run capped by a short, dramatic year at Flexport, and both stints left a legible network of operators he trusts and rehires. Map that network and you map the top of Auger's funnel.
The pattern is documented. At Flexport in 2022 and 2023, Clark pulled in Amazon operators to run commercial, operations, and the new truck brokerage. Parisa Sadrzadeh moved from Amazon logistics to become a Flexport EVP under him. When Ryan Petersen resumed control of Flexport in September 2023, he ejected at least six executives Clark had recruited:
- Teresa Carlson, president and CCO (ex-AWS, ex-Microsoft)
- Darcie Henry, HR (ex-Amazon)
- Tim Collins, operations (ex-Amazon)
- Kelly Cheesman, PR (ex-Amazon)
- Adrienne Wilholt, product (ex-Amazon)
- Jiten Behl, ex-Rivian, now on Auger's board as an Eclipse partner
That last name is the tell. The person Petersen fired in September 2023 is now the board member wiring Auger's $50M Series B. This is not a coincidence. It is a diaspora that consolidated into a single, addressable talent graph, and it is the reason Dave Clark Amazon alumni sourcing works as a first-principles strategy for anyone in the autonomous supply chain hiring race.
The two-hop pattern to trace
The productive search is "Amazon between 2015 and 2022, then Flexport 2022 to 2023, now anywhere," because that is Clark's proven rehire path. Parisa Sadrzadeh is the textbook example: Amazon logistics, then Flexport EVP under Clark, and now a live target for any competitor building against Auger.
You can generalize the pattern into a graph query:
- Worked under Dave Clark or Doug Herrington in Amazon Worldwide Operations or Worldwide Consumer, 2015 to 2022
- Followed him (or a peer) to Flexport in 2022 or 2023
- Was ejected or left after Petersen's September 2023 return
- Currently at Auger, an Eclipse portfolio company, or still on the market
Steps one and two live in LinkedIn's tenure data. Step three requires cross-referencing news coverage with departure dates. Step four requires knowing which Eclipse portfolio companies are hiring supply chain operators right now. Doing that manually across even 200 candidates is a week of work per role, which is the exact gap Refolk closes: you describe the person in plain English ("ex-Amazon ops leader who joined Flexport under Clark and left after September 2023") and get a ranked shortlist that already handles the multi-hop tenure logic.
Why Bellevue matters more than the Bay Area
Clark relocated from Texas back to Seattle specifically to tap the region's talent pool, and Auger's C-suite is stacked with Amazon senior ranks plus leaders from Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, and Salesforce. Any recruiter defaulting to Bay Area filters is missing the density.
The mechanism is simple. Amazon supply-chain and operations engineering alumni are geographically clustered in Seattle and Bellevue. They own houses there. Their kids are in school there. They are structurally remote-averse for family reasons, not preference, and they are far more willing to change employers than to change cities. That makes them poachable inside a 20-mile radius and stubbornly immobile outside it.
Practical implications for your sourcing plan:
- Weight Bellevue, Redmond, and Seattle in your location filters even when the JD says "remote"
- Watch Microsoft Fabric and Azure Solutions Architect certifications in the Seattle metro, because Auger's stack rewards them
- Assume the Bay Area candidates who match on paper will not move, and price the relocation cost in accordingly
- Attend MHI, CSCMP, and RILA Retail Supply Chain Conference in person, because the Clark and Petersen networks physically show up there
The Fanatics 85% number is the interview loop, not a marketing stat
The "85% autonomous decisioning at Fanatics, targeting mid-90s" figure is not a customer testimonial. It is the KPI Clark's solutions engineers get measured on, and it tells you what the hire profile actually does day to day.
An Auger solutions engineer's job is to move a single customer's autonomy percentage up by a few points per quarter by tuning models, adding agents, and closing exception loops. That is the Palantir forward-deployed engineer pattern, not the Snowflake sales engineer pattern. Which means:
- The right candidate has shipped something measurable, not demoed something impressive
- The right resume shows tenure at one account for 12 to 24 months, not a rolodex of 40 logos
- The right interview question is "walk me through a decision you automated and the failure mode you had to catch," not "sell me this pen"
The Auger solutions engineer is a forward-deployed engineer with an ERP scar, not a sales engineer with a demo laptop. </pull>
The Flexport engineer talent pool is still live
Roughly 30 executives were pushed out of Flexport in the six months after Petersen's return in September 2023, and most of them are either at Auger, at an Eclipse portfolio company, or quietly available. Every competitor building in autonomous supply chain should maintain that list as a standing saved search.
The Flexport engineer talent pool is unusually clean for a poaching target because:
- The departures are publicly documented in FreightWaves, CNBC, and WWD coverage
- The severance timelines are known, which sets renegotiation windows
- Many of them followed Clark once already, which is a strong signal they will again
- The Amazon-to-Flexport pattern selects for operators who take risks on new logos
If you are building a competing supply chain AI engineer sourcing motion, you can ask Refolk to surface the intersection of "ex-Flexport 2022 to 2023" and "ex-Amazon Worldwide Operations" without threading three LinkedIn Boolean searches together. That is the kind of query the old sourcing stack handles badly and Refolk handles as one sentence.
The competitor pools worth naming
Auger's realistic poaching lanes are o9 Solutions, Blue Yonder, and JDA Software, plus the ex-Amazon operators still inside AWS Supply Chain and the fulfillment org. These are the same pools any competitor should be draining.
| Pool | Why it fits Auger's profile | Watch-out |
|---|---|---|
| o9 Solutions | Modern planning stack, agent-adjacent work | Comp bands are aggressive, non-competes vary by state |
| Blue Yonder / JDA | Deep TMS and WMS integration experience | Skew older, less model-fluent |
| Amazon Worldwide Operations | Direct Clark alumni network, Bellevue-based | RSU cliffs gate movement; time offers around vests |
| Flexport (2022 to 2024 tenure) | Two-hop pattern proven | Small pool, well-known to every recruiter in the space |
| Microsoft Fabric / Azure supply chain SAs | Stack match, Seattle-clustered | Fewer have shipped agents into production |
FAQ
How do I find candidates who match Auger's actual hire profile if there is no LinkedIn title for it?
Search by former employer and reporting line, not title. The productive query is Amazon Worldwide Operations or Worldwide Consumer tenure between 2015 and 2022, ideally with a Flexport stop between 2022 and 2023, plus Azure or Microsoft Fabric depth. That is a graph query across three tenure signals and a stack signal, which is why keyword search fails and why a plain-English tool like Refolk returns better shortlists than Boolean strings.
Is the Flexport engineer talent pool actually still available in 2026?
Yes, and the diaspora is unusually concentrated. Roughly 30 executives were pushed out after Petersen returned in September 2023, and their moves are traceable through public coverage. Jiten Behl landed on Auger's board via Eclipse. Teresa Carlson, Tim Collins, and the rest of the "Clark six" are all still live targets for any autonomous supply chain hiring plan, and their loyalty pattern says they will follow a familiar operator again.
Why does Bellevue matter so much for supply chain AI engineer sourcing?
Because Amazon's supply-chain and operations engineering alumni are geographically stuck there. Clark moved back to Seattle specifically to tap that pool, and it is where Auger, AWS Supply Chain, and Microsoft Fabric talent physically live. Bay Area filters will miss the density entirely. Weight Bellevue, Redmond, and Seattle in your location signals even for remote roles.
What is the single biggest mistake recruiters make on an Auger-shaped brief?
Treating "solutions engineer" as a Snowflake or Databricks profile. Clark's version is a forward-deployed engineer measured on moving a single account's autonomous decisioning percentage up, closer to the Palantir FDE model. Screen for people who have shipped one thing deep at one account for 12 to 24 months, not people with 40 logos on a slide.