Product Development Engineer

Company Description

Grower-owned by The Wonderful Company, Suterra is part of one of the world’s largest agricultural companies and the global leader in pheromone pest control products. Leveraging over 40 years of experience, Suterra produces hundreds of products used in growing regions across five continents.

Suterra’s state-of-the-art facility in Bend, Oregon integrates all aspects of the business under one roof: research and development, large-scale pheromone synthesis, product engineering, and manufacturing. Suterra’s pest control solutions come in several different forms including proprietary aerosol emitters, sprayable formulations, hand-applied dispensers, and specialized monitoring lures.

Are you ready to go beyond the ordinary and help transform how a global leader in sustainable agriculture operates? At Suterra, we are revolutionizing crop protection through science, innovation, and a shared mission to protect our food supply — and we’re looking for a bold, curious, and hands-on problem solver to help us do it better, faster, and smarter.

Job Description

We are recruiting a Product Development Engineer to design and support product concepts that can be utilized for multiple finished product formulations for customers worldwide. The Product Development Engineer will translate product functional requirements into detailed component and material specifications, develop product performance tests, and manage suppliers that provide outsourced components. This role will extend from product design into product manufacturing, where the Product Engineer will support the specification of equipment and will lead new product launches with supplier qualification and production line trials.

This role provides a unique opportunity to take a product concept all the way from a sketch to a high-volume commercial product on sale in multiple markets.

This person will interface closely with both customer-facing teams and internal departments, including Sales, Field Service, Regulatory, Sourcing, and Manufacturing.

Responsibilities Include:

Product Design:

• Early partnership with marketing teams to identify design elements that are new, unique or difficult and enable their realization through all engineering verification and validation cycles.
• Understanding the functional requirements for the product and developing quantified functional specifications to evaluate product designs.
• Translating functional specifications into detailed component and material specifications.
• Developing test criteria for evaluating the quality of products at the end of the manufacturing process.
• Drive DfX activities in the hardware product development schedules to meet or exceed product targets (ex. Manufacturability, scale, quality, reliability, safety, cost).
• Drive clear and accurate communications and recommendations to peers and senior management by distilling complex technical challenges, outlining options, and providing supporting data.
• Perform technical analyses, recommend, prepare and execute designs of experiments, and characterize process and design interactions.

Supplier Evaluation &

Qualification:

• Identifying candidate suppliers for materials and components.
• Assessing supplier technical capabilities for sourcing decisions.
• Supporting the qualification of new suppliers with on-site visits and quality control assessments.

New Product Launch:

• Devising trials for demonstration of production process capability pertaining to new products.
• Analyzing trial data to identify issues and propose improvements.
• Defining material specifications, SOPs, and process parameters that are compatible with our goals for safety, quality, delivery and cost in mass production.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams and external vendors to identify, characterize and deliver manufacturing processes that enable the commercialization of unique and emerging technologies in new product categories.

Qualifications

• A Bachelor’s Degree in Engineering.
• Three to five years of experience in an engineering role involving product development or manufacturing.
• Demonstrated ability to solve problems while mitigating risks to resources and deadlines.
• Concurrent engineering experience…