Quality Engineer

Quality Engineer

Beehive Industries is dedicated to Powering American Defense by revolutionizing the design, development, and delivery of jet propulsion systems to support the warfighter. Through the integration of additive manufacturing, the company aims to meet the growing and urgent needs for unmanned aerial defense by dramatically improving a jet engine's speed to market, fuel efficiency, and cost.

Founded in 2020, the company is headquartered in Centennial, Colorado, with additional facilities in Knoxville, Tennessee, Loveland Ohio, and Mount Vernon, Ohio. Beehive is committed to grow and advance the defense industrial base while manufacturing exclusively in the USA. This role will be located at our Cincinnati, Ohio facility.

Role Overview

Beehive Industries is seeking a Quality Engineer to lead customer-facing quality activities within our Additively Enabled Castings (AEC) business. AEC uses advanced additive manufacturing and casting technologies to accelerate the development and production of complex aerospace and defense components.

The Customer Quality Engineer will serve as the primary quality interface for assigned customers throughout new product introduction, product qualification, production launch, and recurring manufacturing. This individual will interpret customer-specific quality requirements, establish quality and qualification plans, coordinate required evidence, manage customer submissions, and drive quality issues through resolution.

The Customer Quality Engineer will partner closely with Engineering, Operations, and Quality Inspection. The role requires both technical quality-engineering capability and strong customer communication skills. The successful candidate will be comfortable working through complex customer requirements, accurately managing multiple qualification and documentation packages, communicating difficult information, and establishing structure in a rapidly scaling manufacturing environment.

What You'll Do

Customer Quality Interface

• Serve as the primary day-to-day quality contact for assigned AEC customers.
• Develop trusted relationships with customer quality, engineering, sourcing, and program representatives.
• Lead customer quality reviews covering qualification status, documentation, nonconformances, escapes, corrective actions, process changes, and quality performance.
• Provide timely, accurate, and transparent communication regarding quality risks, issues, containment, investigations, and corrective actions.
• Coordinate responses to customer quality inquiries, concerns, complaints, and requests for information.
• Represent Beehive during customer audits, source inspections, qualification reviews, corrective-action meetings, and other quality-related engagements.
• Lead quality communications when issues could affect product conformity, qualification, shipment, or customer acceptance.
• Partner with the Manufacturing Programs to ensure quality requirements, approvals, and risks are reflected in customer commitments and integrated program schedules.
• Escalate unresolved quality issues or overdue approvals that could affect program execution or customer satisfaction.

Customer Requirements and Quality Planning

• Review purchase orders, drawings, specifications, quality clauses, customer flowdowns, and contractual requirements to identify applicable quality obligations.
• Interpret customer-specific quality requirements and translate them into clear internal plans, processes, deliverables, and acceptance criteria.
• Ensure customer quality requirements are appropriately flowed down to Engineering, Operations, Inspection, Sourcing, and external suppliers.
• Develop and maintain program quality plans, qualification plans, control plans, inspection plans, and customer deliverables matrices.
• Establish quality milestones for new product introduction, including process validation, inspection readiness, First Article Inspection, and customer approval.
• Participate in design, manufacturing-readiness, and production-readiness reviews to ensure quality requirements are addressed before release and launch.
• Apply risk-based quality-planning tools to identify potential product and process failures before they affect the customer.
• Support Advanced Product Quality Planning and Production Part Approval activities when required by the customer.
• Evaluate changes to drawings, specifications, materials, manufacturing processes, tooling, equipment, suppliers, or facilities to determine customer notification or approval requirements.

Qualification and Customer Documentation

• Lead the planning, coordination, review, and submission of customer qualification and quality-documentation packages.
• Own First Article Inspection planning and submissions in accordance with applicable customer requirements.
• Coordinate customer-required documentation, including:
• First Article Inspection and product qualification packages
• Manufacturing and process readiness documentation
• Material, inspection, testing, and special-process certifications
• Certificates of…