Plant Quality Manager

Plant Quality Manager

Proterra offers a dynamic and supportive workplace where our employees can thrive personally and professionally. With cutting-edge facilities and groundbreaking projects, Proterra offers unique opportunities to grow, collaborate, and lead transformative change in the electrification of heavy-duty transportation and equipment.

Our commitment to innovation extends beyond our battery solutions to our people, where we create an environment where everyone feels valued, supported, and empowered to drive change for the earth. Here at Proterra we strive to foster a culture of inclusivity, valuing diverse perspectives and encouraging bold ideas, allowing our employees to bring their full selves to work. Our employees benefit from competitive total rewards packages, and opportunities to develop professionally.

The Plant Quality Manager is a critical operations leader responsible for owning plant quality end-to-end — strategy, execution, and results. This role leads all aspects of quality management within an EV battery manufacturing facility, ensuring products meet internal specifications, customer requirements, and applicable regulatory and safety standards. The Plant Quality Manager drives a culture of continuous improvement, builds and sustains high-performing quality teams, and serves as the key quality partner to production, engineering, supply chain, and customers.

This is a highly visible, floor-present leadership role. Success requires the ability to operate simultaneously at a strategic level — designing and executing the plant quality strategy — and at a hands-on level, actively engaging on the production floor to identify defects, drive root cause resolution, and ensure corrective actions are implemented and sustained.

Quality Ownership & Strategic Leadership

• Own the plant quality strategy — including its design, execution effectiveness, and measurable outcomes
• Define, communicate, and align the organization to quality standards at every level of the operation
• Connect quality metrics directly to plant production goals and customer impact
• Anticipate quality risks before they become customer issues; lead preventive quality, not just reactive fixes
• Treat internal defects with the same urgency as if the customer had already received them
• Review warranty data, customer complaints, and audit feedback regularly; drive systemic corrective action
• Align supervisors and leads to the quality strategy — ensuring teams understand how their daily work impacts overall quality outcomes
• Celebrate quality wins and reinforce expectations consistently across the organization
• End-to-end ownership of incoming inspection including criteria definition in partnership with Engineering and Supply Chain Incoming defect tracking by supplier to drive corrective actions and adjust inspection frequency Escalation expectations when incoming defects threaten production or customer commitments

Quick Response Quality Control (QRQC)

• Establish, own, and continuously improve the plant QRQC process as a foundational function to protect production
• Review and document all issues raised by the line or identified by Quality Technicians every shift
• Identify duplicate issues, repeat failures, safety-critical items, and training-related defects
• Issue quality alerts with urgency — operators must receive timely, clear feedback to prevent recurrence
• Ensure neighbor checks are in place and designed to prevent known failure modes
• Actively participate in morning stand-ups to review issues with operators and cross-functional teams
• Ensure QRQC findings drive root cause analysis and effective corrective actions — not just containment
• Escalate immediately when resources or cross-functional support are needed to drive resolution

KPI Management & Data-Driven Decision Making

• Define and own plant quality KPIs including First Pass Yield (FPY), scrap rate, and QRQC audit findings
• Capture quality metrics in real time; structure data to enable trend analysis, Pareto review, root cause identification, and corrective action tracking
• Review performance daily and weekly; adjust actions proactively based on data trends —

Root Cause Analysis & Continuous…