Director of Controls Engineering - Rain Bird Corporation

Overview

Rain Bird is hiring a Director of Engineering, responsible for technology and product development, quality assurance, and sustaining of all controls-related devices, such as controllers, gateways, sensors, electronic actuators, and similar devices installed at customers’ sites.

The candidate hired will manage and lead a broad set of engineering functions responsible for creating and sustaining Rain Bird’s controls-related devices and will be responsible for enhancing and improving these company capabilities. This organization includes teams responsible for firmware, electrical/electronic hardware, quality assurance, program management, plant engineering, and related functions. The teams are comprised of internal groups of employees and external development partners across multiple geographies.

The Director works closely with business leaders across all of Rain Bird’s market segments to create and execute new product strategy, and collaborates with other engineering teams, technical operations, and manufacturing operations to introduce new products and sustain quality, cost, and delivery performance through the product lifecycle.

Responsibilities

Successful candidates should demonsrate:

• Strong technical background in new product innovation and manufacturing of cost-sensitive consumer electronics products. Deep expertise and experience across electrical/electronic engineering sub-disciplines including cloud and firmware architectures, firmware and hardware development, and quality assurance.
• Strong business acumen, including an understanding of sales, marketing, competitive strategy, markets and channel structures, and finance.
• Outstanding interpersonal and leadership skills.
• S. in Electrical Engineering, or a related Engineering field plus equivalent experience.
• Relevant skills to assimilate a broad spectrum of information (existing products, competitive offerings, available technologies, marketplace trends, customer desires, manufacturing constraints, schedule and budget implications, patents, and more) to generate novel ideas for new product concepts and refine concepts that are produced by others
• Experience with program/project management for new product development
• Dynamic and strategic thinking abilities with a proven track record of delivering results
• Ability to foster creativity and innovation in project teams
• Experience working in multi-cultural environments. This role requires regular travel to work with team members and operations in Mexico as well as multiple US locations.
• Business unit / marketing collaboration. The role requires extensive collaboration with Rain Bird market segment teams to set product roadmaps, strategy, and business priorities.

Qualifications

Candidate should hold the following qualifications:

• Graduate degree in business or a technical discipline
• Financial analysis, and Profit & Loss responsibility
• Expertise and experience with engineered mechanical product and software development
• Experience with legal contracts, patents, and a broad range of manufacturing technologies relevant to industrial and consumer products
• Spanish proficiency

Rain Bird is an equal opportunity employer.

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