Prototyping Manager

Microsoft • Redmond, WA

2d • $119,800 - $234,700

About The Position

Join the Advanced Prototyping Center, where imagination becomes reality. You'll be the go-to partner for designers, engineers, and cross-functional teams who bring us their boldest prototyping ideas—and you'll help turn those ideas into groundbreaking designs, visual models, and physical prototypes.

Requirements

• Bachelor's Degree in Mechanical Engineering, Industrial Design, Industrial Technology, or related field AND 6+ years model making or prototyping work experience OR High School Diploma AND 10+ years model making or shop experience, including building and machining appearance models or prototypes OR equivalent experience.
• 5+ years of people management experience.
• Experience leading multidisciplinary prototyping, model-making, or fabrication teams in a fast-paced product development environment.
• Proven track record of collaborating with designers, engineers, researchers, and product teams to translate ambiguous concepts into high-quality prototypes and physical models.
• Deep knowledge of advanced prototyping methodologies, manufacturing processes, fabrication techniques, materials, and emerging model-making technologies.
• Experience managing multiple concurrent, high-visibility projects, including resource allocation, prioritization, budgeting, scheduling, and risk mitigation.
• Effective people leadership experience with a demonstrated ability to coach, develop, and grow technical teams through empowerment, accountability, and inclusive leadership practices.
• Experience establishing and scaling lab operations, including equipment planning, capital investments, safety programs, vendor management, and operational excellence initiatives such as 5S or similar methodologies.
• Demonstrated history of driving innovation through the adoption of new tools, technologies, processes, or intellectual property that advance prototyping capabilities and improve business outcomes.

Nice To Haves

• Bachelor's Degree in Mechanical Engineering, Industrial Design, Industrial Technology, or related field AND 10+ years model making or prototyping experience in the consumer electronics industry, including building and machining class A appearance models or engineering prototype. OR equivalent experience.

Responsibilities

• Bring ideas to life. Collaborate directly with designers, engineers, and partners to translate early concepts into unique, innovative designs, visual models, and working prototypes.
• Own the big picture. Lead multiple high-impact projects spanning team programs, business groups, and product lines—while managing individual project budgets and contributing to capital equipment planning.
• Drive innovation. Champion new ideas that reshape processes and best practices.
• Be the expert others rely on. Deepen your subject matter expertise across multiple prototyping specialties and use that influence to steer decisions that set your team up for success.
• Shape the strategy. Partner with senior leaders in the model-making discipline to build business plans, gathering and incorporating input from your team along the way.
• Grow the next generation. Mentor team members across a wide range of techniques, sharing deep expertise from across the discipline.
• Build lasting partnerships. Cultivate new relationships with external suppliers, leading the charge on model and project delivery and guiding project specifications from concept to completion.
• Lead people. Manage, develop, and inspire a talented team—driving employee growth, executing projects, and elevating performance.
• Leverages expertise and experience to provide perspective on the business and needs of the organization.
• Solicits input from team members to incorporate into business operation planning, working with senior leaders within Model Making to develop plans.
• Cascades strategic direction and objectives to team members.
• Influences decisions to ensure success of their team.
• Implements strategies for streamlining work to allow team members to accomplish tasks with minimal difficulty and a high degree of expertise.
• Works directly with designers, engineers, and other partners who approach the team with a prototyping idea.
• Interprets prototyping needs and communicates with key work partners about feasibility based on the intent of the proposed prototype, providing advice and suggestions to further enhance prototyping idea based on experience.
• Ensures understanding of finishing and assembly requirements.
• Works collaboratively across teams and with key work partners to provide updates, communicating any deviations or changes in planning or direction.
• Ensures team members are well informed in order to effectively deliver final prototypes and/or parts.
• Develops and implements strategies and procedures to encourage continuous communication both within the organization and with key work partners.
• Leads team to adopt and adhere to security best practices for internal and external data sharing.
• Avoids using unsecured email platforms to protect sensitive data and ensure compliance with security standards.
• Refines subject matter expertise across multiple specialties.
• Considers how the company could become a key player in creating new methodologies, techniques, or technologies to advance the industry.
• Anticipates and develops future areas of expertise across the organization.
• Brainstorms methods of moving the industry forward and creating intellectual property.
• Synthesizes diverse technologies into novel solutions with an understanding of how to apply technologies efficiently while securing confidential intellectual property against evolving threats.
• Combines tools and techniques together to invent new processes and parts that can be utilized across groups.
• Contributes to the broader prototyping strategy, identifying and actively seeking to implement new processes.
• Demonstrates a connection to the prototyping industry and awareness of trends.
• Assesses how the organization is using current as well as emergent technologies (e.g., is the organization learning just from others or pushing the industry forward.
• Examines new technologies and seeks to determine additional techniques and technologies that could be developed.
• Considers if teams are using appropriate technologies or if more innovation is needed.
• Managers deliver success through empowerment and accountability by modeling, coaching, and caring.
• Model: Live our culture. Embody our values. Practice our leadership principles.
• Coach: Define team objectives and outcomes. Enable success across boundaries. Help the team adapt and learn.
• Care: Attract and retain great people. Know each individual’s capabilities and aspirations. Invest in the growth of others.
• Champions ideas that influence new approaches for processes and best practices.
• Develops and leads the implementation of creative and strategic approaches for addressing problems.
• Builds mechanisms and infrastructures to encourage creativity in the problem-solving process.
• Fosters an environment that encourages innovation using inspiration across the organization.
• Uses previous experiences to determine how best to approach a project given timing or budget considerations.
• Adapts lessons learned from a particular situation (e.g., product, customer) and applies learnings to build a competitive advantage.
• Integrates seemingly unrelated information to develop strategic approaches to projects and incorporate security strategies into project planning and execution.
• Recognizes processes that are likely to succeed or fail, and steps in to redirect team members' efforts, as needed.
• Takes calculated risks that are supported by business case.
• Holds responsibility for multiple projects across team programs, business groups, or a product line.
• Communicates necessary changes to impacted team members.
• Advises others on breakdowns, challenges, or obstacles to mitigate or prevent their occurrence, including potential security challenges or vulnerabilities.
• Outlines a plan for execution and delegates responsibilities across model makers.
• Pivot plans based on changing priorities, business needs, or stakeholder requests.
• Provides a clear vision to team members and highlights project time schedules.
• Turns high visibility requests received into project specifications, considering various factors (e.g., model fidelity, importance, budget, time investment).
• Defines a path to take when planning a new project, setting priorities for tasks based on their urgency.
• Develops a future oriented perspective regarding prototyping work.
• Looks across prototyping work plans to consider potential scalability and workability.
• Determines how to find the right process for different types of projects.
• Proactively identifies planning gaps to understand what path should be taken to accomplish a project or set of projects.
• Regularly provides broad project oversight, aiding team members in driving and establishing priorities.
• Verifies teams' plans are aligned to the correct standards.
• Ensures clarity is obtained across teams on delegated tasks and requirements.
• Creates unique or innovative designs, visual models, and prototypes.
• Stays up to date on new model making technologies and techniques, encouraging their team to seek out and develop new techniques and incorporate security standards to improve projects, designs, and prototypes.
• Provides guidance to team members on how to communicate designs to key work partners.
• Proposes breakthrough solutions that contribute to efficiency improvements.
• Adds value with mechanism design.
• Reviews teams' designs to provide input and suggestions based on best practices.
• Authors design and security best practices and shares with the team, encouraging a security-first culture among team members.
• Advises team members on how to make future designs and solutions iterative.
• Drives model making practices to align with key work partners.
• Collaborates with relevant work partners to determine the direction for unique models and prototypes.
• Provides guidance to team members on possible materials, resources, machinery, and equipment requirements needed for current and future projects.
• Delegates shop responsibilities to team members, as appropriate.
• Considers scalability of plans and how that could affect resource requirements.
• Champions best practices for lab management (e.g., 5S).
• Holds responsibility for individual project budget management.
• Contributes to managing capital equipment budget.
• Participates in the decision-making process to determine when internal and external resources should be used.
• Oversees the logistics of the lab.
• Coordinates with an array of teams to ensure lab is able to function effectively (e.g., Facilities Management, Security, Information Technology [IT], Procurement).
• Leverages corporate partners within the Center of Excellence (CoE) to run the lab.
• Staffs projects, including managing resource planning and scheduling needs, for immediate team.
• Understands which team members are best suited for particular projects given their skillsets and training.
• Advocates for strategic investments in security technologies and protocols that protect lab environments, ensure data integrity, and support secure collaboration.
• Drives a competitive playing field for global supplier base.
• Co-develops new services (e.g., technologies, software, materials, tools/equipment) with suppliers.
• Continually fosters and builds new relationships with external suppliers, leading efforts to deliver on models and projects and providing guidance on project specifications.
• Ensure prototype specifications incorporate secure data handling, transport parameters, security protocols, and security practices.
• Understands the dynamic between internal and external sourcing for projects.
• Determines which source is best to use depending on project specifications and business needs.
• Oversees the development of policies and procedures for managing supplier compliance with Microsoft procurement, accounting, shipping, and security protocols and standards.
• Advises team members on how to maintain supplier compliance.
• Develops standards for setting pricing/costs and schedules with suppliers.
• Empowers team members to negotiate with suppliers to meet Microsoft business goals.
• Leads efforts across the team to accurately translate prototype specifications (e.g., verbal, written, drawings, and three-dimensional [3D] data) into actionable direction for global suppliers.
• Mentors team members on a range of techniques, relying on deep subject matter expertise from across the discipline.
• Leads efforts to help team members problem solve issues related to creating models.
• Proactively gathers cross-functional input and feedback from key work partners.
• Synthesizes model and security-focused feedback and identifies best practices.
• Drives the implementation of best practices across the team.
• Demonstrates shop leadership.
• Understands the interaction between teams and how successes or challenges faced across teams can impact the success of a project or parts coming together.
• Leads team to implement security best practices to develop resilient and compliant solutions.

Benefits

• Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others, and collaborate to realize our shared goals. Each day we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond.

What This Job Offers

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