Manufacturing Design Engineer- Soft Goods

Apple•Cupertino, CA

About The Position

In this highly visible role, you will manage selection, implementation, optimization, and scale up of manufacturing processes for our legendary soft goods products. You will utilize your mechanical engineering experience and work across multi-functional teams in Product Design and Industrial Design to assess product features for manufacturability and recommend capable processes and equipment.

Requirements

BS in Mechanical Engineering, Industrial Engineering, or a related field.
7+ years of experience supporting new product launches from a mechanical, tooling, or product development perspective.
Experience with mechanical fabricated parts or adhesives, glues, jigs, fixtures, tooling, injection molding, plastics experience is required.
Deep experience applying Design of Experiments (DOE), Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing (GD&T), and Statistical Process Control (SPC) techniques.
Experience leading suppliers’ technical team in the development and qualification of manufacturing process
Experience defining & executing mass production qualification requirements
Experience solving complex mechanical or manufacturing challenges.
Strong written and verbal communication skills.

Nice To Haves

International experience, particularly in Asia.
Experience with highly cosmetic parts.

Responsibilities

Process Development: Planning, proposing, and leading experiments to produce timely and accurate analyses used to drive design, development, and supply chain decisions.
Assessing the suitability of a fabrication technology for a given part design.
Planning validation exercises to demonstrate initial feasibility as well as manufacturing capability.
Analyzing results of validation exercises and provide technical recommendations.
New Product Introduction: Acts as lead engineer to drive process development and capability assessment activities, reviewing part design documentation to ensure alignment with process capability.
Assigns specific tasks and work with Apple suppliers to support process development and/or data gathering activities.
Set clear goals for results and provide timely reviews of performance throughout program.
Establish validation procedures to determine acceptance of tooling into development builds as well as mass production.
Supplier Execution: Review supplier tool design, process flow, equipment selection, DFM, and DOE proposals.
Identify shortfalls and corrective actions to ensure design compliance.
Work with supplier engineering teams to map out process development exercises, secure resources, and commit to schedules in line with program goals.
Assess supplier readiness to support build events and production ramp.
Identify potential execution issues and provide recommendations to mitigate risk.