Director of Engineering

Simmonds Precision•Vergennes, VT

5d•Onsite

About The Position

The Director of Engineering – Fuels and Proximity is responsible for translating business-unit strategy into effective engineering execution across the fuel sensing and proximity sensing product portfolios. This position supports the Business Unit Manager by providing technical leadership for the portfolio and ensuring that customer needs, product strategies, and business objectives are converted into clear engineering priorities and executable plans. The Director will lead the development of robust technical solutions to customer problems and requirements while ensuring predictable delivery against schedule, cost, quality, and performance commitments. This role requires strong technical rigor, disciplined resource management, proactive risk identification, and close engagement with customers to understand their current and future needs. The Director is also responsible for building a high-performing engineering organization by developing employees, strengthening technical and leadership capabilities, and establishing effective succession plans for key roles.

Requirements

Think and act like an owner, balancing customer needs, technical performance, risk, cost, and long-term business value.
Maintain strong customer intimacy and use customer insight to guide technical priorities and product-development decisions.
Set clear expectations and hold the organization accountable for predictable execution.
Build trust through transparency, sound technical judgment, and consistent delivery.
Develop people and organizational capability as deliberately as products and technologies.
Create an environment where risks and problems are surfaced early, decisions are data-driven, and corrective actions are executed with urgency.
Work with and collaborate with cross company engineering teams

Responsibilities

Support the Business Unit Manager by leading the fuel sensing and proximity sensing portfolios from a technical and engineering perspective.
Translate business-unit strategy, customer requirements, and product-growth objectives into engineering priorities, product roadmaps, milestones, and execution plans.
Maintain a close working relationship with customers to understand their technical challenges, operational needs, emerging requirements, and future product expectations.
Lead the development of robust, reliable, producible, and cost-effective solutions to customer problems and requirements.
Ensure engineering programs and customer commitments are delivered predictably, meeting schedule, cost, quality, technical-performance, and regulatory requirements.
Establish clear program objectives, engineering plans, resource requirements, and accountability for execution.
Identify technical, schedule, cost, and resource risks early and drive mitigation actions before they affect customer or business commitments.
Provide technical leadership and oversight for new-product development, product redesign, technology development, product sustainment, obsolescence management, and customer technical support.
Ensure appropriate technical rigor through disciplined design reviews, analysis, testing, verification, validation, qualification, and configuration management.
Partner across Engineering, Sales and Marketing, Operations, Quality, Supply Chain, Sales, and Finance to ensure alignment and successful execution of business-unit priorities.
Drive engineering productivity through design reuse, standardization, design-to-cost, process improvement, and improved execution efficiency.
Build and maintain the engineering capabilities, tools, processes, and technical expertise required to support the current and future product portfolio.
Recruit, develop, coach, and retain high-performing engineering talent.
Develop employees through meaningful assignments, regular feedback, career-development planning, and increased levels of responsibility.
Establish succession plans for critical engineering leadership and technical roles and actively develop future leaders and technical experts.
Create a performance-oriented engineering culture characterized by technical excellence, accountability, collaboration, customer focus, urgency, and a bias for action.
Provide clear, fact-based communication on engineering performance, resource requirements, technical risks, and recovery plans to business-unit and site leadership.