Job Description:The Principal AQE - Textiles primary duties are to utilize advanced engineering expertise in the Textiles field to contribute to the development and qualification of innovative products and to mentor other engineers cross-functionally to improve the department's technical skills. The Principal AQE is a critical member of the New Product Development (NPD) team reporting to Quality Engineering leadership. Throughout a product's development cycle, this position requires strong cross-functional communication skills and analytical experience to help launch new and exciting solutions that meet our user's needs. You will work in a fast-paced environment to innovate new products and textile material solutions as a member of a cross-functional team. The Principal AQE may be asked to act as mentor to junior level AQEs on NPD projects in addition to their normal workload.
Duties and Responsibilities:Product and Material Development
- Act as a Textiles Subject Matter Expert (SME) helping NPD teams determine optimal materials and designs to improve product performance and meet user expectations
- Interface with Front End Innovation (FEI) team to adapt highly innovative textile materials to production
- Participate in user need research to identify "critical to quality" (CtQ) requirements on materials selection, design features, and construction methods for knit and sewn products
- Collaborate with Engineering and Marketing to define the products' specifications leading in all aspects of performance, quality, reliability, and testing
- Lead Risk Assessments (Design and Manufacturing) for NPD projects during the product development cycle
Supplier & Manufacturing
- Lead supplier process and QMS audits focused on textile-specific risks
- Establish process capability expectations for textile production at finished goods factories and material facilities as required
- Ensure timely failure reporting and lead root cause analysis and effective corrective/preventative actions (FRACA)
Testing/Analysis
- Lead development of capability at multiple test laboratories implementing new and innovative test methods to better quantify product performance
- Own interpretation of global textile performance standards and drive correlation between testing at internal labs and regulatory labs
- Develop test plans and prove out test methods based on new or established product designs to ensure products meet customer requirements
- Perform DOE to support Engineering in their understanding of quality concerns and improvements to design
- Analyze, draw conclusions, report and present product information utilizing statistical techniques such as Weibull analysis, reliability distributions and matrices
- Communicate concise, logical, written conclusions from experiments based on data analysis
Mentoring/Leadership
- Mentor junior level AQEs in developing CtQ requirements, test methodologies and design, setting production specifications and creation of design of experiments
- This position is recognized as a topic expert within the AQE teams, it will be asked to provide, as need, training, mentoring and guidance to REs related to that topic
Job Requirements:- Position requires 70% of its time supporting product development work with 30% of its time dedicated to systemic and AQE organizational improvement/development
- Bachelor of Science Degree in Engineering or educational equivalent field
- 10+ years of experience directly supporting textiles or soft goods product quality
- Experience with new product commercialization processes emphasizing design, manufacturing, quality, test or reliability activities
- Experience including training in quality engineering fundamentals and proven experience leading a primary function within a project team
- Previous relevant experience with Design of Experiments, life data analysis, and other related statistical tools and software (i.e. Minitab, Reliasoft)
- Demonstrate skills in mentoring other employees in statistical techniques
- Written and verbal communication skills and creative problem-solving capabilities
- Ability to travel 20% of the time is required (travel includes Domestic and International)
- Preferred: ASQ Reliability Engineering Certification (ASQ-CRE) or the ability and desire to achieve certification
- Preferred: Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) or Six Sigma experience
