Job Description Summary

The Senior Controls Quality Engineer will provide technical leadership for Controls Quality processes focused on issue management, quality metrics, defect prevention, and continuous improvement. This role will lead the Issue Disposition Forum (IDF) process and use quality data, including Cost of Poor Quality (CoPQ), escaping defects, and issue trends, to identify systemic improvement opportunities across the Controls organization.
The successful candidate will work cross-functionally with Controls Quality, engineering, integration, technical leadership, and other stakeholders to ensure product issues are consistently assessed, risk evaluated, dispositioned, tracked, and translated into actionable improvements.
This position requires strong technical judgment, analytical capability, process leadership, and the ability to influence across organizational boundaries without direct authority.

Job Description

Roles and responsibilities

Issue Disposition and Quality Governance

• Lead and continuously improve the Controls Issue Disposition Forum (IDF) and associated issue-management processes.
• Own the operating rhythm for issue intake, investigation readiness, risk assessment, disposition, routing, and follow-through.
• Facilitate cross-functional technical discussions to ensure issues have clear problem statements, appropriate risk assessments, documented rationale, ownership, and actionable paths forward.
• Partner with Controls technical leaders, development teams, integration teams, and quality stakeholders to drive timely and consistent issue disposition.
• Promote consistent application of Severity, Occurrence, Detectability, and other risk-based methods used to evaluate Controls issues.
• Monitor the issue backlog and lifecycle to identify aging, recurring, or high-risk issues requiring additional organizational attention.
• Support release and gate-review activities by ensuring relevant issue risk and disposition information is visible to decision makers.

Quality Metrics and Analytics

• Lead development, governance, and continuous improvement of Controls Quality metrics and reporting.
• Analyze Cost of Poor Quality (CoPQ), escaping defects, issue trends, and other quality indicators to identify recurring failure modes and opportunities for improvement.
• Develop meaningful leading and lagging indicators that provide visibility into product quality, process effectiveness, defect containment, and organizational improvement.
• Establish repeatable methods for translating quality data into actionable insights for engineering and quality leadership.
• Partner with stakeholders to improve data quality, metric definitions, reporting consistency, and traceability.
• Develop dashboards and management-level reporting that communicate quality trends, risks, and improvement opportunities clearly and objectively.

Continuous Improvement and Defect Prevention

• Identify systemic improvement opportunities based on issue trends, escaping defects, field experience, CoPQ, and lessons learned.
• Lead or facilitate cross-functional improvement initiatives addressing recurring quality problems and process weaknesses.
• Drive feedback loops that translate field and lifecycle experience into improvements in engineering practices, validation strategy, test coverage, requirements, and quality processes.
• Evaluate the effectiveness of corrective and preventive actions using measurable quality outcomes.
• Promote Lean problem-solving, root-cause thinking, and data-driven decision making across Controls Quality processes.
• Develop scalable processes that improve both product quality and organizational efficiency.

Technical and Cross-Functional Leadership

• Serve as a senior technical and process resource for Controls Quality issue management and quality analytics.
• Influence engineering teams and technical leaders through data, technical analysis, structured problem solving, and risk-based recommendations.
• Lead complex quality initiatives involving multiple engineering functions and stakeholders.
• Provide guidance and mentorship to engineers supporting issue investigation, disposition, metrics, and continuous-improvement activities.
• Represent Controls Quality in cross-functional discussions where product quality, defect risk, or systemic improvement opportunities are being evaluated.
• Drive alignment where ownership, priorities, technical risk, or required actions cross organizational boundaries.

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Computer Science, or a related technical discipline.
• 10+ Years in an engineering development or quality assurance role.

Desired Characteristics

• Strong understanding of engineering quality, product lifecycle, software development, validation, and defect-management processes.
• Experience with structured risk-assessment techniques such as FMEA.
• Experience with Cost of Poor Quality, escaping-defect analysis, defect trending, root-cause analysis, or similar quality methodologies.
• Demonstrated ability to identify patterns across multiple issues and convert those insights into systemic process or product improvements.
• Strong analytical and data-visualization skills.
• Experience developing dashboards, metrics, or automated reporting solutions.
• Demonstrated ability to lead through influence in a matrixed engineering organization.
• Strong facilitation skills and experience leading technically complex discussions involving multiple stakeholders.
• Ability to balance immediate issue resolution with longer-term systemic improvement.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to communicate complex quality and technical topics concisely to leadership.

Additional Information

 

 

Candidates should be aware that this role involves a client's critical infrastructure; shortlisted candidates would therefore be subject to heightened security checks as directed by our clients. All personal data will be handled with the utmost confidentiality and in accordance with our data protection policies, solely for recruitment and security purposes.