Associate Director, R&D Quality Engineering

Boston Dynamics•Waltham, MA

3d•$155,000 - $195,000

About The Position

The Associate Director, R&D Quality Engineering is a senior leadership role responsible for the quality engineering function across Prototype Operations - spanning prototype builds, low-volume production, supplier quality, and the failure investigation discipline that turns hardware problems into design and process improvements. This leader owns quality strategy and execution for an environment most quality organizations never see: designs that change weekly, BOMs that mature during the build, and robots that must work anyway. R&D quality at Boston Dynamics exists to make the organization learn faster - catching escapes before they consume build capacity, driving root cause investigations to verified closure, and building the data foundation (genealogy, serial/revision traceability, defect analytics) that tells the truth about how hardware is actually performing. The Associate Director balances two opposing forces daily: enough rigor that failures teach us something, and enough speed that quality never becomes the reason a robot didn't ship. The ideal candidate has deep quality engineering fundamentals, hard-won judgment about which rules matter in an R&D context, and the credibility to hold engineering, operations, and suppliers to the same standard.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering, Manufacturing Engineering, Quality Engineering, or a closely related technical field, or equivalent experience.
12+ years of progressive quality engineering experience in complex hardware environments, with 5+ years leading quality teams through NPI, prototype, or low-volume production phases.
Demonstrated mastery of structured problem solving (8D, DMAIC, or equivalent) with a track record of driving cross-functional root cause investigations to verified closure.
Deep working knowledge of GD&T, measurement systems analysis, process capability, first-article inspection, and process validation.
Experience building supplier quality programs, including qualification, source inspection, and corrective action management.
Hands-on experience with quality data systems, traceability/genealogy, and MES-based defect management.
Judgment to right-size quality rigor for an R&D environment - and the spine to hold the line where it matters.
Strong executive communication; able to present quality risk to senior leadership with data and a recommendation.

Nice To Haves

Experience in robotics, aerospace, automotive, medical device, or similarly demanding electromechanical hardware environments.
Experience scaling quality systems through rapid rate ramps (prototype through pilot production).
ASQ certification (CQE, CMQ/OE), Six Sigma Black Belt, or equivalent formal training.
Familiarity with reliability engineering methods (FMEA, DOE, test-to-failure) and how they interface with quality.
Experience with regulated or standards-based quality systems (ISO 9001, AS9100) and the judgment to apply their intent without their overhead.

Responsibilities

Define and execute a quality strategy fit for prototype-to-production reality: right-sized controls that scale with build rate and design maturity, applied deliberately rather than inherited from mass-production dogma.
Establish clear quality gates across the build sequence - subassembly, integration, end-of-line - with acceptance criteria that evolve as the product does.
Own the escape metric: track it honestly, Pareto it relentlessly, and drive it down through systemic fixes rather than added inspection.
Advise leadership on quality risk in rate decisions - when to hold, when to conditionally release, and what the data actually supports.
Own the 8D program as standing policy: containment first, verified root cause (demonstrated by the ability to turn the failure on and off), and corrective actions with owners, dates, and effectiveness checks.
Enforce disciplined problem decomposition — occurrence, detection, and systemic causes each addressed on their own track — so investigations converge instead of sprawling.
Anchor investigation priority to the top Pareto items; resist fragmenting effort across every anecdote.
Lead cross-functional investigation teams through ambiguous, first-of-kind failures where no playbook exists, and teach the organization the method while doing it.
Own first-article and process validation for critical purchased parts; qualify new and dual-source suppliers with capability evidence, not paperwork.
Deploy batch-release and source-inspection strategies for at-risk suppliers, including on-site capability development where the supply base is thin.
Drive supplier corrective actions to verified closure and feed supplier performance data into sourcing decisions.
Partner with Supply Chain on incoming inspection strategy for parts where an escape costs a build week.
Own serial and revision traceability across builds — genealogy that can answer "which robots have the suspect part" in minutes, not days.
Build and maintain defect capture, disposition, and analytics workflows (MES/Tulip-based) that make quality data a leadership instrument rather than an archive.
Establish process validation standards for new manufacturing and repair processes, scaled to volume and risk.
Provide the single source of truth on quality status in program reviews and executive forums — accurate, current, and free of spin.
Build, develop, and retain a quality engineering team suited for R&D: engineers who can hold rigor and speed in the same hand.
Coach engineering and operations teams on quality methods — 8D, process validation, measurement systems — raising the organization's baseline rather than gatekeeping it.
Set the cultural tone that quality is everyone's output and quality engineering is its enabler, not its police force.