Supplier Quality Engineer, Closures

What to Expect

Tesla's Supplier Quality team are responsible for critical component development, quality management, continuous improvement, and qualification activities at suppliers and for ensuring production line is protected from disruption due to incoming supplier quality issues. The job requires effective communication at all levels both with internal and external teams, conducting failure analysis, leading statistical process control activities for critical components, limited travel to in-region suppliers, and on-the-spot critical decision making.

The goal: developing suppliers by teaching best practices for manufacturing, quality, and engineering, delivering on time quantities of high-quality component parts into Tesla's production processes to enable extremely rapid development cycles and product launches, driving lean manufacturing principals to reduce waste and improve quality.

• The team consists of Supplier Quality Engineers (SQE) and Supplier Quality Assurance (SQA) technicians who ensure production line is protected from disruption due to supplier quality issues, while driving actions with suppliers. This cross-functional role requires team members to work closely with Factory teams towards issue identification and containment, and with Supply Chain teams towards issue resolution and corrective actions
• Conducts investigations to identify and/or confirm potential and escalated supplier quality issues; develops and implements immediate countermeasures to quickly resolve supplier quality spills and prevent production downtime; creates sustainable countermeasure requirements (including scope of work, standardized work instructions, PPE, tools, equipment, and cycle time) to maintain production uptime and trains Quality Inspection team and their 3rd parties to execute them
• Issues and drives supplier corrective action requests (SCAR) to initiate and track to closure supplier's containment actions, root cause analysis, and corrective and preventative action identification and implementation; conducts part quality audits and trials at the component, subsystem and/or system level to confirm/verify supplier's implemented containment actions and corrective & preventative actions are effective; reviews supplier's root cause analysis and corrective and preventative actions for problem resolution adequacy and efficacy and provides feedback to them and their assigned Supplier Industrialization Engineer for correction, as required
• Supports part and packaging trials driven by new product launches, Tesla design changes, and/or Supplier (process) changes at the component, subsystem and/or system levels within the Factory to verify, validate and provide feedback on quality impacts
• Facilitates and leads meetings with stakeholders to address supply chain and/or supplier quality (emerging) issues and/or changes
• Seeks opportunities to improve processes and part quality whilst reduce part costs; collects and shares lessons learned for issue prevention and continuous improvement
• Support containment, SCAR, continuous improvement and/or personal professional development activities at supplier locations, other Gigafactories and/or Tesla warehouses/operating sites, as required

• Degree in Mechanical, Automotive, Industrial, Manufacturing Engineering or equivalent experience
• 3+ years of industry experience in quality, production, or manufacturing engineering departments
• Demonstrated experience collaborating with suppliers of closure mechanisms, including latches, hinges, strikers, sealing systems, and power liftgate/actuation systems
• Must have in-depth, working knowledge of Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing (GD&T); deep understanding of PFMEAs, control plans and problem-solving methodologies such as 8D, 5
  
  Why, and Ishikawa; familiar with SPC, hypothesis testing and data analysis; experience applying QMS, APQP, PPAP, and Red-X methodologies preferred
• Experience with leading manufacturing process and control plan audits (audit development experience a plus)
• Possess demonstrable leadership, project management, and cross functional collaboration and teambuilding skills; proven results…