Senior Product Engineer; onsite

Senior Product Engineer

Johnson Controls is seeking a driven and technical Senior Product Engineer to join our Air-Cooled Centrifugal Chillers team at the Advanced Development and Engineering Center in New Freedom, PA. In this high-impact role, you'll be at the heart of our industry-leading, high-volume product lines—ensuring they consistently deliver exceptional performance in quality, cost efficiency, and manufacturability.

You'll develop deep product expertise and play a pivotal role connecting design engineering with a global network of air-cooled centrifugal manufacturing facilities. This is a hands-on, execution-focused opportunity where your work will directly influence product performance and operational excellence—ideal for someone who thrives on ownership, problem-solving, and driving continuous improvement in a fast-paced environment. This position is based onsite at our office in New Freedom, PA.

Candidates must be commuting distance to this location, or able to relocate. Various relocation packages are available.

Design-to-Factory Bridge

• Serve as the primary technical interface between the air cooled centrifugal design engineering team and the global network of air cooled centrifugal manufacturing facilities—ensuring that engineering intent is fully translated into executable factory process.
• Collaborate with Manufacturing Engineering, Quality, and Production teams across factory sites on-site and remotely to resolve drawing conflicts, tolerance concerns, and producibility issues in existing product documentation.
• Participate in Change Control Board (CCB) reviews; author and process Engineering Change Notices (ECNs) with full factory impact analysis including effectivity date planning, BOM accuracy, and work instruction alignment.
• Work closely with Contract Engineering teams to ensure that customer-specific modifications to standard product are engineered within factory capability constraints.

Quality Improvement

• Own recurring and systemic quality issues on the air cooled centrifugal product line, driving root cause analysis through structured methodologies (8D, A3) and translating findings into permanent engineering corrective actions.
• Implement DFMEA updates, tolerance studies, and design-level countermeasures for in-production quality defects identified through factory audits, warranty data, or field feedback.
• Partner with the Quality Engineering team to disposition nonconforming material and determine engineering accept/reject criteria.
• Support PPAP activities for component or supplier changes that result from quality-driven engineering modifications.

Design for Manufacturability (DFM) Improvements

• Identify DFM gaps in existing product designs that result in assembly difficulty, rework, scrap, or extended factory cycle time, and champion engineering changes to address them.
• Participate in DFM review events for product line changes, representing the factory's practical assembly perspective and ensuring new configurations can be built reliably at rate.
• Work with Industrial Engineering and Manufacturing Engineering to validate that DFM improvements deliver measurable improvement on the production floor.

Cost Management

• Identify and lead cost reduction opportunities within the existing air cooled centrifugal product line, including material substitution, specification rationalization, component standardization, and BOM simplification.
• Develop engineering cases for value engineering changes, providing technical justification, risk assessment, and implementation plans to gain cross-functional approval.
• Track implemented cost improvement projects against savings targets; maintain project status visibility for leadership reporting.
• Engage with Supply Chain and Procurement to evaluate supplier-driven alternatives, ensure engineering requirements are maintained, and qualify new parts into the product.

PTS and Field Support

• Provide engineering support to the Product Technical Support (PTS) team for escalated field issues on air cooled centrifugal product, including analysis of field failure reports, return material evaluation, and development of field-applicable corrective actions.
• Author and support…