Senior Manager, Program Management

Overview:

• The Senior Manager, Program Management will own global product engineering for automotive products customer base.
• In this role, the senior program manager will orchestrate successful engineering customer interfaces and will be the escalation path for the customer.
• With their global cross-functional team, he / she will be responsible for planning, managing, and completing the engineering development of automotive products.
• This position will drive world-class engineering development to meet customer deliverables and prototype deliveries while managing the team to adhere to high quality processes / standards that ensure zero customer defects.

What You Will Do

• Manage customer interface and direct customer communication strategy with Japan OEMs. Ensure assignments from Japan OEMs are well understood, distributed to core teams, and reasonable for success.
• Build and manage customer relationships.
• Work with customer interface teams to manage issues
• Represent product engineering team in new business opportunities by interfacing with core team /customer / sales. Drive business case inputs and product engineering engagement on new technologies.
• Build and maintain a customer interface team – responsible to manage the customer from the entry-level to the senior-level. Evaluate and develop team members.
• Serve as internal expert on Japan OEM development processes
• Analyze and negotiate program schedules with internal and external stakeholders.
• Ensure product costing targets are achieved for each product. Maintain records of BOM costs compared to targets; escalate within company when targets are not achieved. Ensure design actions are implemented to recover any cost variance in BOM cost target.
• Ensure adherence to engineering best practices / processes and facilitate creation of new best practices as appropriate
• Own and maintain the resource budget and cost of external resources.
• Ensure engineering teams have equipment and facilities needed to meet customer requirements. This includes budget as well as acquisition.
• Back up engineering colleagues in Japan Office and program management team as appropriate.
• Oversee decisions regarding product content, budget and timing to ensure the product is on-time, on-schedule, on-quality, and meets all customer acceptance criteria (Performance and Features).
• Manage product risk proactively, identify engineering risks and coordinate meetings with the PM and multi-discipline functions to address risks before they become issues.
• Evaluate engineering processes and metrics to track and measure engineering success. Update processes where needed to address customer-specific requirements. Ensure all engineering disciplines are designing per company processes and customer processes.
• Ensure customer requirements are communicated throughout internal engineering teams. Ensure customer requirements are met with the product designed. Manage customer interface teams to clarify requirements when needed

What You Need

• Bachelors in Engineering, Masters preferred
• 8+ years related technical experience
• 5+ years in engineering leadership or technical program management
• Proficient in Japanese language
• Able to communicate in English (spoken and written)
• Experience as a supplier to Japanese carmakers
• Experience managing global teams
• Experience in consulting and/or client-facing role is preferred
• Must have general knowledge of automotive engineering.
• Must be able to articulate vision and influence decision making outcomes with internal stakeholders, external suppliers, and the customer.
• Must have a "whatever-it-takes" attitude using diplomatic leadership skills within a collaborative teamwork environment to accomplish the necessary results.
• Proven and effective communication, analytical, judgment, initiative and execution skills.