Engineering Manager (Product Development & Realization)

The Product Development & Realization Engineering Manager leads a team of multi-disciplinary engineers (Mechanical and Electrical) responsible for executing product development from design through validation, release, and sustaining support. This role owns the delivery of high‑quality, manufacturable product solutions while ensuring strong technical rigor, process discipline, and execution consistency. The position provides people leadership and technical authority, guiding design decisions, ensuring alignment to requirements, and drives effective execution across NPI, VAVE, engineering change, and customer-driven product configurations. Working closely with cross-functional teams and the Engineering Systems function, this role ensures engineering outputs are complete, validated, and ready for production, serving as the core execution engine that bridges product development and operational readiness.

Essential Functions:

• Lead execution from concept design freeze through validation, release, and early lifecycle support, ensuring product designs are fully defined, manufacturable, and successfully transitioned into production.
• Set and reinforce high standards for design quality, rigor, and completeness across multidisciplinary teams (ME/EE), using active involvement in design reviews, project planning, DFMEA, validation, and day-to-day coaching to elevate technical judgment and work quality.
• Integrate design, validation, manufacturability, and cross-functional readiness into clear release decisions, partnering with Manufacturing, Quality, Supply Chain, and Product Management to ensure products are prepared for successful production launch and early lifecycle support.
• Define what winning looks like through clear outcomes and performance metrics, and build a culture of accountability by reinforcing ownership, feedback, recognition, and high expectations in the flow of work.
• Co-own execution discipline for engineering processes and workflows—including NPI, VAVE, engineering change, and product realization—in partnership with the Engineering Systems role, ensuring teams follow standard work in ways that improve predictability, quality, and time-to-market.
• Lead the team to deliver strong results with focus and urgency, recognizing when to pivot, reprioritize, or adjust direction quickly to maintain execution momentum.
• Drive structured problem solving and root cause analysis, ensuring issues are deeply understood and resolved with sustainable fixes that prevent recurrence.

Critical Success Factors:

• Establishes a High-Accountability, Metrics-Driven Engineering Team - Builds and leads a team that consistently performs against clear, measurable outcomes, where engineers understand what winning looks like and take ownership of delivering it. Creates an environment where accountability is visible, self-driven, and continuously improving through feedback, learning, and performance tracking.
• Delivers Faster Results Through Rigor, Learning, and Execution Excellence - Drives the team to deliver high-quality results with speed by embedding rigor early in the design process, minimizing downstream rework, and continuously improving execution. Actively guides the team through challenges, pivots quickly when needed, and ensures solutions are both effective in the moment and sustainable over time.
• Improve engineering effectiveness - reinforcing clear documentation, knowledge capture, and disciplined technical communication so work can be understood, reviewed, transferred, and sustained across the team and product lifecycle.

Education & Experience Required:   

• Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, or related engineering discipline; advanced degree is a plus.

• 8+ years of engineering experience in a manufacturing or product-based environment, including leadership of product development, validation, release, and sustaining engineering activities.

• Demonstrated ability to operate as a technical authority in a multidisciplinary engineering environment, setting expectations for rigor, reviewing work for completeness and sound judgment, and providing direct coaching through design reviews, project planning, and technical problem solving across mechanical, electrical, or electromechanical product development.

• Proven success using data, performance metrics, and operating rhythms to define expectations, track execution, identify gaps, and improve delivery outcomes, including faster time-to-market and reduced downstream rework. Experience building dashboards or similar metric-based management tools is a plus.

• Demonstrated ability to balance execution speed with sound engineering judgment, knowing when to accelerate, when to escalate risk, and when to hold for greater technical or production readiness.

• Strong root-cause problem-solving capability, with experience driving issues to sustainable resolution and continuously improving team execution, decision-making, and performance over time. Experience with structured methodologies such as FMEA, 8D, A3, or similar approaches is a plus.

• Experience reinforcing disciplined use of engineering processes and workflows in a way that builds team belief, engagement, and trust in the process as a driver of quality, speed, and lifecycle sustainment. Experience partnering closely with engineering systems or workflow ownership roles is a plus.

• Working knowledge of core engineering design tools used across the team, with the ability to navigate and review mechanical and electrical design outputs and understand how MCAD and ECAD systems interact to support cohesive product development. Familiarity with SolidWorks and Altium is preferred.

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