Lead Value Engineer

Caterpillar Inc.•Mesa, AZ

8d•$128,470 - $192,710•Onsite

About The Position

The Lead Value Engineer serves as the regional authority for quantifying and demonstrating the business value of Caterpillar's mining technology solutions. Leveraging expertise in mining operations, mine planning, and performance optimization, this role establishes operational baselines, evaluates improvement opportunities, and develops data-driven business cases for MineStar™ technologies, including Autonomous Haulage Systems (AHS), Fleet Management, Onboard, and Underground solutions. Reporting to the Global Manager, Performance & Value Intelligence, the Lead Value Engineer partners closely with Commercial teams, Customer Value Enablement teams, and Performance Intelligence partners to translate operational insights into measurable customer outcomes that support technology adoption, guide deployment strategies, and maximize return on investment. This role is instrumental in helping customers achieve operational improvements while advancing Caterpillar's global value engineering capabilities. This role offers a unique opportunity to shape the future of mining by helping customers realize the full value of transformative technologies. As the regional value engineering expert, you'll combine operational expertise, data-driven analysis, and strategic customer engagement to influence major technology investments and deployment decisions. You'll partner with mine site leaders, executives, dealers, and global Caterpillar teams to solve complex operational challenges, identify opportunities for improvement, and demonstrate the measurable impact of solutions such as autonomous haulage and digital fleet optimization. With a direct connection between your work and customer success, this role provides significant visibility, influence, and the opportunity to drive meaningful business outcomes across some of the world's most advanced mining operations.

Requirements

Consulting: Proven ability to advise customers, dealers, commercial partners, and internal stakeholders on operational improvement opportunities and technology investments. Skilled at facilitating discussions, challenging assumptions constructively, and developing evidence-based recommendations that drive business value and operational performance.
Customer Focus: Demonstrated ability to understand customer operational goals and define success through measurable business outcomes. Proven success partnering with customers to identify value opportunities, align technology solutions to operational needs, and ensure sustained realization of value throughout the customer journey.
Technical Excellence: Demonstrated expertise in mining operations, mine planning, fleet optimization, and performance analysis, combined with a strong understanding of mining technologies such as MineStar™, Autonomous Haulage Systems (AHS), Fleet Management, Onboard, and Underground solutions. Ability to apply technical knowledge to quantify value opportunities, support technology adoption, and drive measurable operational improvements.
Problem Solving: Strong analytical and critical-thinking skills with the ability to evaluate complex operational challenges, identify root causes of performance gaps, and develop practical solutions that improve productivity, efficiency, and business outcomes. Ability to leverage operational, production, financial, and benchmark data to support sound decision-making.
Effective Communications: Exceptional communication and presentation skills with the ability to translate complex mining, operational, technical, and financial concepts into clear, compelling messages for diverse audiences ranging from technical site personnel to executive leadership. Proven ability to build confidence in business cases and influence strategic decision-making.
Relationship Management: Demonstrated success building and maintaining trusted relationships with customer operations and mine planning teams, commercial organizations, dealers, and cross-functional global stakeholders. Ability to collaborate effectively and influence outcomes without direct authority to achieve shared business objectives.
Field Support: Experience working directly with mining customers and site-based teams to assess current-state performance, validate operational assumptions, and support the successful deployment and adoption of technology solutions. Ability to operate effectively in field environments while partnering with customers to achieve targeted performance and value outcomes.
Service Excellence: Commitment to delivering high-quality, data-driven insights and recommendations that support customer success. Ability to establish credible value baselines, develop achievable business cases, and ensure customer expectations are supported by measurable performance outcomes and continuous improvement.

Nice To Haves

Bachelor's degree in Mining Engineering, Industrial Engineering or a related field; advanced degree or business/finance qualification preferred.
Significant experience in mining operations, mine planning or operational improvement roles.
Experience with MineStar™ or similar fleet management, autonomy or mining technology solutions.
Experience developing business cases, value baselines, benchmarks or simulations for mining or industrial operations.
Proficiency with mine planning, simulation or analytics tools (e.g., haulage simulation, scheduling software, Excel modeling, Power BI or similar).
Customer-facing experience supporting commercial pursuits, consulting or technical sales.
Experience working across cultures and with remote, site-based and customer-embedded teams.

Responsibilities

Lead value engineering for the region, serving as the go-to expert for customer business case analysis across new pursuits and existing customer sites.
Establish value baselines for customer operations using operational, production, cost and performance data.
Build value simulations and business case models that quantify the productivity, cost, safety and utilization impact of MineStar technologies.
Apply mine planning and operational expertise to evaluate haul cycles, fleet sizing, equipment utilization, material movement and operating constraints that drive value.
Partner with Commercial and Sales teams to shape customer value propositions, support pursuits and provide domain expertise in customer discussions.
Work with Performance Intelligence and Performance Monitoring peers to baseline existing operations and translate performance insights into benchmarks for future sites.
Apply global benchmarking from existing deployments to assess value potential and readiness at new and prospective customer sites.
Define the value targets and assumptions that regional Customer Value Enablement teams use as the definition of success during deployment.
Support value realization reviews by comparing actual performance to the business case, explaining gaps and recommending what will close them.
Present value findings and business cases to customer operations, mine planning, finance and executive stakeholders.
Contribute to global value engineering standards, methods and tools, and share lessons learned across regions.