Customer Quality Engineer

PPG Industries • Oak Creek, WI

2d • Hybrid

About The Position

The Customer Quality Engineer (CQE) is responsible for ensuring customer quality requirements are met and for leading the resolution of customer quality issues across the product lifecycle. This role serves as the primary quality liaison between customers and internal cross‑functional teams, driving root cause analysis, corrective actions, and continuous improvement initiatives. The CQE plays a critical role in maintaining customer satisfaction, compliance with quality standards, and sustained product and process performance.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Quality, or a related technical discipline, or equivalent experience.
• Experience in technical development, customer quality, manufacturing quality, or automotive engineering.
• Demonstrated knowledge of problem‑solving methodologies and quality tools.
• Ability to manage multiple priorities in a fast‑paced, customer‑focused environment.
• The person who will be successful in this role is comfortable driving cross-functional teams without direct authority while creating an atmosphere of collaboration, respect, and a continuous improvement.
• Strong judgment and decision making skills, with the ability to evaluate data, assess risk, and make sound, timely decisions in a customer facing environment.

Nice To Haves

• Automotive industry and coatings experience.
• Working knowledge of IATF 16949.
• Experience supporting customer and third‑party audits.

Responsibilities

• Lead customer quality issue resolution, including driving compliance to our QMS and utilization of ETQ and owning final response and closure of RCA.
• Manage customer claims, quality concerns and complaints by ensuring timely containment, RCA, PA verification, response and closure.
• Act as the escalation point for high‑severity or critical customer issues, internal or external, to support overall customer satisfaction.
• Ensure all customer‑specific requirements are clearly understood, documented, and integrated into internal processes and represent voice of customer for related MOC.
• Serve as the gatekeeper in Customer Feedback (ETQ) process, with authority to review, accept, prioritize, and close customer quality requests, including validation of root cause completion and effectiveness, authorize the implementation and verification of corrective action countermeasures, ensuring actions are effectively executed, validated, and sustained to resolve customer quality issues.
• Lead structured problem‑solving activities using recognized methodologies or customer specific required methodologies (e.g., 8D, 5 Whys, Fishbone, Is Is Not).
• Coordinate cross‑functional teams to investigate internal and external non‑conformances.
• Ensure root causes are evidence-based and corrective and preventative actions address systemic failure modes.
• Ensure corrective and preventive actions are implemented with the highest sense of urgency and focused to be robust, effective, and sustainably implemented, including for similar technologies or processes.
• In collaboration with the regional cluster quality leader, ensure that RCA findings are shared with applicable PPG sites for lesson learned to ensure risk of similar occurrence is properly addressed at other PPG locations.
• Serve as the primary point of contact for customer quality issues in the field and represents PPG professionally during customer reviews, meetings, and audits.
• Provide clear, timely, and professional communication regarding issue status, risks, and resolution plans to manage customer expectations during investigations, escalations, and recovery activities
• Build and sustain collaborative working relationships with customer plant leadership as well as engineering organizations who support quality and production processes.
• Proactively identify potential quality risks and coordinate preventive actions aligned with the PPG plant quality management system.
• Promote compliance with applicable quality management system requirements, including customer‑specific requirements (CSRs) and IATF standards and PPG internal standards(APQP, FMEA, LPA).
• Lead customer specific audits with support of QA manager for customers in escalation status.
• Drive continuous improvement initiatives to reduce complaint rates and improve overall quality performance using a data drive approach.
• Partner with Manufacturing, Process Engineering, Supply Chain, Sales, Planning, Technical Laboratories, and Customer Service teams to resolve issues and implement improvements to continuously improve customer satisfaction as reported on customer scorecards.
• Support packaging, handling, storage, logistics, and transportation quality initiatives as required.

Benefits

• Opportunity to grow and develop your career in an environment that provides a fulfilling workplace for employees, creates an environment for continuous learning, and embraces the ideas and diversity of others.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level