Quality & Manufacturing Engineering

Job description

At Meter, our brand reputation is built on product reliability and seamless execution. As a brand owner partnering with external JDMs, we do not just buy manufacturing capacity — we actively govern it. This hybrid Quality & Manufacturing Engineering role is the vital technical bridge between our internal R&D teams and our manufacturing partners. You will not be micromanaging assembly lines or designing fixtures from scratch; instead, you will own supplier governance. By establishing razor-sharp quality metrics, aligning internal engineering specs with vendor control plans, and turning the factory floor from a "black box" into a data-driven operation, you directly safeguard our brand's bottom line and ensure our products reach customers flawlessly and on time. We are in a pivotal phase of growth that involves scaling new product introductions. A standard engineer who only checks boxes won’t suffice; we need an exceptional gatekeeper who can influence without authority, command the respect of our partners' engineering teams, and anticipate production risks before they cause delivery delays. The cost of a single quality escape or a botched factory migration is steep — it strains our internal R&D resources with firefighting and delays our future product roadmaps. By bringing your deep technical acumen, rigorous root-cause analysis, and vendor management expertise to Meter, you will unburden our design teams, build a robust quality culture across our supply chain, and serve as the ultimate guardian of our product integrity. WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE In your first six months at Meter, success means moving our external manufacturing relationships from a reactive footing to proactive, data-driven governance. You will have successfully embedded yourself as the definitive technical gatekeeper at our partner sites. Specifically, you will be expected to drive and deliver the following three measurable results within your first 6 months: - Standardize JDM Quality Governance & Zero-Ambiguity Specs: You will establish the first baseline matrix for our JDM partners' First-Pass Yield and deploy a standardized reporting dashboard. By aligning 100% of Meter’s internal engineering specifications with the partner’s manufacturing Control Plans, you will eliminate all gray areas in cosmetic and functional quality expectations. - Execute a Flawless Line Setup: You will successfully manage the line setup with zero critical quality escapes to customers. You will ensure 100% validation of critical tooling, fixtures, and testing stations, securing a successful site qualification audit on the first attempt. - Stabilize Line Performance: Within 4 to 6 weeks following the line setup, you will drive their engineering teams to resolve early assembly bottlenecks, bringing the new line's First-Pass Yield up to match or exceed our production baseline. WHAT YOUR DAY-TO-DAY WILL LOOK LIKE If you are looking for a desk job where you just read reports, this isn’t it. You won't be soldering components or writing code, but you will be the ultimate orchestrator of our manufacturing reality. You will be juggling the immediate needs of an active production line with the long-term quality strategy for our next-generation products. Here is what a typical day looks like: - Own the Quality Baseline: You’ll be the pulse of our manufacturing quality, establishing the automated dashboards, FPY thresholds, and gating metrics that keep our JDM partners honest and aligned with Meter’s high standards. - Bridge the Gap with Manufacturing Partners: Act as our primary technical voice on the shop floor, translating complex internal R&D specifications into foolproof Control Plans and ensuring zero ambiguity in cosmetic and functional quality expectations. - Drive Partner Accountability: You’ll lead quality and 8D reviews that demand rigor—smashing through lazy "operator error" excuses, deep-diving into root causes, and ensuring JDM teams deploy permanent, data-backed CAPAs. - The Ultimate Cross-Functional Collaborator: Work shoulder-to-shoulder with Meter’s internal teams, embedding manufacturing insights and DFX (DFM/DFA) principles into design reviews so our next-gen products scale seamlessly. - Get Into the Weeds: You’re never "too senior" to help. Whether it’s reviewing raw Gage R&R error logs, inspecting and signing off on a Limit Sample, or jumping on a late-night call to unblock a stalled NPI line, you’re ready to dive in. WHO YOU ARE We are looking for a rare breed of engineer: someone who possesses the technical depth to challenge a factory director, the diplomacy to align cross-functional teams, and the operational grit to oversee complex factory migrations. You don't just want to build products; you want to master the systems that scale them. Here is the profile of the exceptional person we are looking for: - The JDM Diplomat: You speak fluent "factory language." You have spent 5+ years navigating the unique dynamics of external manufacturing partners. You know exactly how factories cut corners, how they hide yield drops, and most importantly, how to motivate their engineering teams to prioritize Meter’s products without having direct authority over them. - A Technical Auditor, Not a Checklist Checker: When a partner says an issue was just "operator error," your immediate instinct is to look at the PFMEA, the fixture design, and the raw error logs. You have a deep, practical grasp of core quality tools and you use them as strategic levers to enforce accountability, not as paperwork to file away. - Comfortable in the "Gray Area": You can take an ambiguous, high-level engineering specification from our internal R&D team and translate it into a foolproof, objective Control Plan for an operator on the assembly line. You hate ambiguity and proactively build the frameworks to eliminate it. - Data-Driven & Analytics-First: You don’t manage by "gut feeling" or take a vendor's word at face value. You live in the data. You are highly proficient in analyzing manufacturing metrics, plotting yield trends, and using data to pinpoint hidden risks on the shop floor before they manifest as costly field returns or shipment delays. - Hands-on and Present: You are not an "armchair engineer" who manages strictly via email. You are eager to roll up your sleeves, look at high-definition line feeds (or travel to the site when necessary), examine limit samples, and anchor yourself to the reality of the shop floor to protect Meter's brand integrity. WHY METER? The internet runs the world. Every purchase you make, video call you join, it's all packets flowing through networks. But those networks haven’t changed for decades. They’re brittle, complex, and surprisingly hard to set up in an enterprise space. We started Meter to build better networks. We had to build everything from the ground-up: designing and building our own enterprise hardware, intuitive software, and streamlined operations to deliver great outcomes for our customers. Today, we build and deploy these networks at scale. Ambitious companies and enduring institutions like Bridgewater, Lyft, Reddit, rely on Meter to keep their thousands of employees and locations online and productive. Our bet with Meter is simple: we will all use the internet more than we do today. We believe we have the definitive networking stack in place to enable business to do so as seamlessly and reliably as any modern utility.