R&D Manager, Engineering

Responsibilities

Key Accountabilities

Essential Functions

• Acts as Functional Manager of the Detection Systems and Algorithms (DSA) team.
• Oversees development and maintenance of staff's skills, competencies, and capabilities particularly in the areas of optical engineering, digital signal processing, machine-vision, and algorithm development.
• Develops and promotes best practices in Function’s area(s) of domain-expertise.
• Plans and supports professional development of direct reports. Monitors and determines staff training needs.
• Monitors performance of direct reports and works closely with HWE leadership to develop a succession and talent management pipeline that aligns with the department’s human and intellectual-capital strategy.
• Attracts, retains, and manages Function’s bench, promoting balance between technical breadth and depth (e.g. balancing Function’s generalist and specialist ratios) while promoting a culture of engineering-excellence.
• Suggests, implements, and maintains Function's objectives and initiatives, meeting regularly with team and direct reports.
• Develops and manages Function's budget(s), as necessary.
• Monitors and ensures that adequate personnel, equipment, and material resources are available to meet project milestones across multiple programs.
• Independently plans and suggests future needs for programs, aligning innovation initiatives with the appropriate cross-functional stakeholders and cross-department leadership.
• Reviews Function's schedule(s) for assigned projects. Tracks metrics to monitor burn-down rates and quality, ensuring robust and reliable solutions are delivered on-schedule. Provides contingency plans for identified conflicts. Incorporates lessons learned from past projects and works with Quality to update policies and procedures as required.
• Partners with Project Management to ensure that the Function's activities and deliverables are aligned with program plans.
• Ensures delivery of all new product development and on-market support needs as required, acting in both a functional management and individual technical contributor role, as required (i.e. acts as a player-coach).
• Assigns, directs, and evaluates technical work. Provides technical guidance to direct reports. Responsible for the quality of deliverables from within the Function.
• Acts a subject matter expert in the Function’s domain of expertise and acts as a single-point of contact for cross technology center support (i.e. SME in area(s) of optical engineering, machine vision, digital signal processing, and algorithm development)
• Understands relevant industry trends and best practices. Adopts and institutes new processes or technologies. Maintains membership in relevant standards committees as required.
• Champions, promotes, and practices robust design practices.
• Effectively communicates technical information to multidisciplinary teams in the form of documentation, presentations and technical summaries.
• Identifies product defects and recognizes outliers in results Able to explain and document product defects and their impact.

Secondary Functions

• May act as technical adviser or lead the resolution of complex technical issues pertaining to optical, detection, machine vision, and/or sensor based modules and sub-systems.
• May be assigned CAPA ownership.
• May participate with top management in long-range company planning concerning new or project areas of technical research or advancements.
• May define and communicate engineering strategy & roadmap for the Function.

• Proven technical leadership experience, including people management, team development, coaching, organizational influence, and change leadership.
• Strong program and cross-functional leadership skills, including resource planning, prioritization, stakeholder alignment, communication, negotiation, and issue resolution.
• Expertise in electro-optical detection systems, including sensor fusion, detector integration, system verification, reliability engineering, root-cause analysis, and DFX methodologies.
• Deep knowledge of optical systems and photonics, including imaging systems, illumination design, optical architecture, sensor characterization, lasers, lenses, filters, detectors, and optical path design.
• Experience with optical alignment, calibration, tolerance analysis, signal-to-noise optimization, image quality assessment, and related characterization techniques.
• Strong background in machine vision, computer vision, and imaging algorithms, including image processing, segmentation, classification, pattern recognition, camera calibration, and AI/ML-based vision applications.
• Proficiency in Python, MATLAB, and/or C/C++, with experience in data analysis, statistical modeling, automated test systems, version control, and DevOps/ML-Ops environments.

Travel Requirements

Up to 10% of time

• Project management
• Service
• Marketing

• Education: Bachelors Degree in Engineering, Science, or related Field.
• Experience
• Eight to ten years of product development experience, depending on degree
• Six years of experience in Functional Management
• For internal candidate promotion: Demonstrated proficiency in meeting all competencies of current level and acceptable performance history may be used in lieu of experience
• in vitro medical experience highly desirable
• Additional skills/ Knowledge
• Language" Proficiency in English language required

Closing

If you are interested in constantly learning and being challenged on a daily basis we encourage you to submit your resume or CV.

We operate directly in over 30 countries, and in more than 100 territories through distributors. Annual revenue is approximately $2 billion and more than 7,000 employees around the world comprise our Werfen team.

www.werfen.com