Director of Application Engineering & Customer Insights

Sealed Air designs and delivers packaging solutions that protect essential goods transported worldwide, preserve food, enable e-commerce and digital connectivity, and help create a global supply chain that is touchless, safer, less wasteful, and more resilient. We strive to foster a caring, high-performance growth culture that will deliver consistent, sustainable profitable growth and accelerate our performance – a culture where accountability is clear and aligned, and where we reward business outcomes and impact.

That culture guides everything we do, including how we partner with our customers and suppliers, how we attract and retain top talent, and how we create and deliver value to our stakeholders. In 2025, Sealed Air generated $5.4 billion in sales and has approximately 16,100 employees who serve customers in 119 countries/territories. To learn more, visit

Sealed Air Protective Packaging R&D is seeking a leader to build and lead a global Application Engineering (AE) function that connects customer operations to system-level requirements, validated performance, and differentiated innovation. This role is front-and-center in supporting new product development, mapping customer needs, conducting in-use competitive benchmarking, and leading Level 2 technical escalations. Turning real-world learning into faster launches, higher reliability, and leapfrog opportunities.

This role is located in Charlotte, NC and will be expected to be in office Monday through Thursday with flexibility to be remote on Fridays.

• System Performance Specifications:
  Own fitness-for-use performance specifications across consumables, equipment, and integrated systems; ensure requirements are testable and actionable.
• NPD Qualification & Beta Leadership:
  Lead consumable qualification on equipment platforms and customer beta qualification plans; validate solutions under real operating conditions.
• Customer Needs Mapping:
  Lead structured observations and workflow mapping in customer operations (pack–protect–ship), identifying pain points and translating them into clear system requirements.
• Customer Insight Engine:
  Build a repeatable process to capture learning from beta programs, trials, and field issues; synthesize insights into opportunity statements for targeted future development.
• Competitive Analysis (Technical & In-Use):
  Plan and execute hands-on benchmarking vs. alternatives in customer environments; quantify gaps, identify differentiation spaces, and recommend performance targets.
• Level 2 Customer Support (Escalations):
  Serve as the escalation owner for complex system-level issues (especially new/recent launches, integrated solutions, or beta platforms); drive root cause and feed learnings into design/spec updates.
• Cross-Functional Integration:
  Partner tightly with Materials R&D, Equipment R&D (US & China), Marketing, Sales Applications, and Service to resolve tradeoffs and accelerate decisions.
• People Leadership:
  Recruit, coach, and develop an AE team with strong test rigor, customer presence, and systems thinking; set standards for analytical excellence and technical communication.
• Marketing: AE provides evidence-based customer and competitive insights;
  Marketing owns segmentation, positioning, and portfolio commercial decisions.
• Sales / Service: AE owns Level 2 system escalations and pre-/early-commercial technical learning.
• Materials & Equipment R&D: AE does not own formulation chemistry or equipment architecture; AE owns requirements, validation, and system performance across both.

• Robust product specifications to reduce or eliminate product failures at customer
• Reduced late-stage design changes and rework during beta qualification.
• Faster time from design…