Customer Quality Engineer

Responsibilities

• Serve as the customer-facing owner for quality topics, ensuring timely, clear, and professional updates on issues, risks, and resolutions.
• Translate customer feedback (VoC) into actionable requirements, defect reports, and improvement projects.
• Manage customer portals/scorecards, track performance, and coordinate responses to audits and surveys.
• Lead structured problem solving (8D, 5 Whys, Ishikawa/Fishbone, DMAIC) for customer complaints, field returns, and escalations.
• Own CAPA lifecycle (containment, root cause verification, corrective & preventive actions, effectiveness checks).
• Define and track SLAs/SLOs for response and resolution; escalate risks early.
• Partner with Design/Engineering, Manufacturing/Operations, and Supplier Quality to prevent recurrence and design in quality.
• Maintain risk artifacts (e.g., FMEA, Control Plans, APQP); ensure change control and deviation/waiver handling reflect customer commitments.
• Maintain SPC, MSA/Gage R&R; support first-article inspections and process validations.
• Build and maintain dashboards for DPPM/PPM, defects per release, complaint rate, escape rate, turnaround times, warranty/return trends, and customer scorecards.
• Identify and prioritize systemic improvements that reduce variation, cycle time, and cost of poor quality (COPQ).
• Collaborate with Supplier Quality on supplier-caused issues impacting customers; ensure closed-loop corrective action.
• Compliance & Audits (as applicable)
• Lead Gemba walks and introduce 5S methods
• Train and lead on Six Sigma methods and practices using the DMAIC structure.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Engineering (Mechanical, Industrial, Manufacturing, Electrical, Quality) or closely related field; or equivalent experience.
• 3–7+ years in quality engineering or customer-facing technical roles with direct ownership of escalations and CAPA.
• Demonstrated expertise in root cause analysis (8D, 5 Whys, Ishikawa), corrective actions, and data-driven decision making.
• Strong communication skills—able to engage customers credibly, synthesize technical detail, and influence cross-functional teams.
• Proficiency with quality/statistical tools (e.g., Minitab/JMP, Excel/Power Query; familiarity with Power BI/Tableau is a plus).
• ASQ CQE, Six Sigma Green/Black Belt, or Certified Internal Auditor (ISO 9001) (nice-to-have).
• Experience with APQP, PPAP, FMEA, Control Plans, SPC, and MSA (manufacturing) or with incident postmortems, SLAs/SLOs, defect triage, and telemetry/observability (software) (nice-to-have).
• Familiarity with customer portals and enterprise systems (e.g., Salesforce/Service Cloud, ServiceNow, JIRA) (nice-to-have).
• Knowledge of GD&T, metrology/CMM, tolerance analysis, reliability testing, and field failure analysis (FA) (nice-to-have).