Director Production Engineering (m/f/d)

About the Role

As Director of Production Engineering, you are accountable for the end-to-end production engineering capability across all manufacturing operations. Your mission is to industrialize development outputs into repeatable, scalable, and compliant serial production, ensuring manufacturing readiness, process stability, quality, cost efficiency, and on-time delivery. You lead the team that converts early procedures into robust production standards, embeds them in PLM/MES systems, and drives continuous improvement across the factory.

You act as the primary interface between Engineering (design & development) and Manufacturing (production & operations)—ensuring requirements, procedures, tooling, documentation, test strategies, and digital manufacturing infrastructure are aligned for high-rate, high-quality execution.

Production engineering strategy & leadership

• Define and execute the production engineering roadmap, including industrialization strategy, standardization, and scalability for serial production.
• Lead and develop a team of production/process/manufacturing engineers; set goals, coaching plans, hiring needs, and performance standards.
• Establish clear governance for process ownership, engineering change implementation, and cross-functional decision-making.

Assembly, integration & test (AIT) process ownership

• Own manufacturing process definition across:
  • Assembly: mechanical/electrical build procedures, torque specs, critical process parameters, work instructions.
  • Integration: subsystem integration strategy (e.g., avionics, propulsion, communications), sequencing, interfaces, and acceptance criteria.
  • Testing: functional, subsystem, and system-level test strategy; test readiness, execution plans, and troubleshooting methodology.
• Ensure processes are repeatable, auditable, and optimized for safety, throughput, and quality.

Industrialization & manufacturing readiness (NPI / transfer to production)

• Coordinate with development teams to receive initial procedures and convert them into production-ready standards (control plans, critical-to-quality characteristics where relevant).
• Drive manufacturing readiness reviews, line readiness, and process qualification for new products, variants, or upgrades.
• Lead the “first builds”/pilot runs, capturing learnings and stabilizing procedures for volume execution.

Digital manufacturing (PLM/MES) & configuration control

• Own the production engineering contribution to PLM/MES:
  • Translate procedures into structured digital work instructions.
  • Ensure traceability, configuration control, and alignment of as-built data.
• Oversee creation and maintenance of:
  • mBOM (Manufacturing Bill of Materials)
  • BOP (Bill of Process)
  • Routings, work centers, and data collection points for quality and traceability.
• Ensure engineering changes are implemented cleanly and quickly, with minimal disruption to production.

Documentation, compliance & quality partnership

• Work instructions, process specifications, test reports, NCRs (non-conformance reports), deviations/waivers, and as-built configurations.
• Partner with Quality to build robust nonconformance management and corrective action systems (root cause, containment, RCCA & PA).
• Ensure processes meet applicable regulatory, customer, and internal compliance requirements.

Cross-functional execution & production support

• Serve as senior escalation point for technical blockers in production: diagnose recurring issues, direct corrective actions, and prevent reoccurrence.
• Align with Supply Chain and Operations on:
  • Kitting strategy, material availability, critical path timelines, and constraint removal.
• Coordinate engineering support coverage and readiness for shifts, rate increases, and critical campaigns.

Continuous improvement, cost & throughput

• Support Lean Team on Lean/CI initiatives to improve:
  • Yield, cycle time, takt adherence, OEE, scrap/rework reduction, and labor efficiency.
• Establish KPIs and operating mechanisms (tier meetings, weekly business reviews) to track and improve production engineering performance.
• Build business cases for capital investments (test equipment, tooling, automation) and manage the budget for your scope.

Capability building