Product Engineer

Johnson Controls • San Antonio, TX

1d • $89,000 - $149,000 • Onsite

About The Position

Johnson Controls is seeking a skilled and motivated Product Engineer to join the Water Cooled Centrifugal Chillers team at the San Antonio Facility. This is a continuous engineering (sustaining engineering) role focused on keeping an existing, high-volume product line performing at the highest level across quality, cost, and manufacturability. This person will serve as the critical bridge between the Global Engineering organization based in JADEC and the San Antonio factory, ensuring that global designs are successfully and efficiently incorporated into production.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering or closely related engineering discipline.
• Minimum of 3 years of experience in product engineering, sustaining engineering, or manufacturing engineering for complex mechanical equipment — preferably in HVAC, refrigeration, or rotating machinery.
• Proven experience executing engineering changes in a manufacturing environment, including BOM management, drawing updates, and cross-functional coordination through change control processes.
• Familiarity with MAPICS / SAP or equivalent ERP systems for BOM management, material status, and engineering documentation.
• Experience with quality problem-solving tools (8D, A3, DFMEA) and demonstrated ability to drive issues to root cause and permanent corrective action.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills; comfortable interfacing directly with factory floor teams and with engineering management.

Nice To Haves

• Direct experience with water cooled centrifugal chiller products, including familiarity with compressor staging, heat exchanger design, and refrigerant circuit architecture.
• Experience in a factory-connected product engineering role (factory product engineer, sustaining engineer, or DFM engineer) in which direct engagement with manufacturing operations was a primary job function.
• Bilingual proficiency in English and Spanish.

Responsibilities

• Serve as primary interface between Global Engineering (JADEC) and San Antonio factory.
• Collaborate with Manufacturing Engineering, Quality, and Production teams across factory sites on-site and remotely to resolve drawing conflicts, tolerance concerns, and producibility issues in existing product documentation.
• Participate in Change Control Board (CCB) reviews; author and process Engineering Change Notices (ECNs) with full factory impact analysis including effectivity date planning, BOM accuracy, and work instruction alignment.
• Work closely with Contract Engineering teams to ensure that customer-specific modifications to standard products are engineered within factory capability constraints.
• Own recurring and systemic quality issues on the water cooled centrifugal product line, driving root cause analysis through structured methodologies (8D, A3) and translating findings into permanent engineering corrective actions.
• Implement DFMEA updates, tolerance studies, and design-level countermeasures for in-production quality defects identified through factory audits, warranty data, or field feedback.
• Partner with the Quality Engineering team to disposition nonconforming material and determine engineering accept/reject criteria.
• Support PPAP activities for component or supplier changes that result from quality-driven engineering modifications.
• Identify DFM gaps in existing product designs that result in assembly difficulty, rework, scrap, or extended factory cycle time, and champion engineering changes to address them.
• Participate in DFM review events for product line changes, representing the factory's practical assembly perspective and ensuring new configurations can be built reliably at rate.
• Work with Manufacturing Engineering to validate that DFM improvements deliver measurable improvement on the production floor.
• Identify and lead cost reduction opportunities within the existing water cooled centrifugal product line, including material substitution, specification rationalization, component standardization, and BOM simplification.
• Develop engineering cases for value engineering changes, provide technical justification, risk assessment, and implementation plans to gain cross-functional approval.
• Track implemented cost improvement projects against savings targets; maintain project status visibility for leadership reporting.
• Engage with Supply Chain and Procurement to evaluate supplier-driven alternatives, ensure engineering requirements are maintained, and qualify new parts into the product.
• Provide engineering support to the Product Technical Support (PTS) team for escalated field issues on water cooled centrifugal products, including analysis of field failure reports, return material evaluation, and development of field-applicable corrective actions.
• Author and support issuance of technical communications, service advisories, and field upgrade kits as needed.
• Support occasional field visits to investigate high-priority customer issues requiring engineering-level analysis.
• Maintain accurate and current product documentation in PLM and SAP, including drawings, BOMs, and specifications relevant to the water cooled centrifugal line.
• Support product line engineers and engineering leadership with technical analyses, studies, and special projects as assigned.

Benefits

• Competitive salary
• Paid vacation/holidays/sick time
• Comprehensive benefits package including 401K, medical, dental, and vision care.
• On-the-job/cross-training opportunities
• Encouraging and collaborative team environment
• Dedication to safety through our Zero Harm policy

What This Job Offers

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