Senior Production Engineer

Role Purpose

The Senior Production Engineer is a technical leader responsible for defining, developing, and optimising the end-to-end production capability for defence-grade hardware systems. This role provides strategic influence across design, industrialisation, and full-rate manufacturing, ensuring products are engineered for reliability, regulatory compliance, and scalable delivery.

The Senior Production Engineer is a technical leader responsible for defining, developing, and optimising the end-to-end production capability for defence-grade hardware systems. This role provides strategic influence across design, industrialisation, and full-rate manufacturing, ensuring products are engineered for reliability, regulatory compliance, and scalable delivery.

Operating within a secure and highly regulated environment, the Senior Production Engineer drives manufacturing excellence through robust process development, disciplined configuration control, and structured risk management. The role champions Design for Manufacture and Assembly (DFMA), strengthens cross-functional collaboration between engineering and operations, and ensures production readiness from prototype through series manufacture.

As a senior technical authority, the role mentors engineering teams, guides continuous improvement initiatives, and leads the development of resilient production solutions for complex electro-mechanical systems, supporting both programme delivery and long-term operational capability.

• Reporting to the Production Engineering Manager and in his absence the Industrialisation Manager.
• Translate hardware designs into robust, scalable production processes, ensuring manufacturability, repeatability, and compliance with defence standards.
• Develop and optimise production workflows, including tooling, fixtures, assembly methods, and test procedures.
• Lead root cause analysis and corrective actions for production issues, driving continuous improvement and reducing defects.
• Collaborate closely with design engineering to influence early design decisions and ensure alignment with production capability.
• Create and maintain manufacturing documentation, including build instructions, process specifications, PFMEAs, and control plans.
• Support new product introduction (NPI) from prototype through to full rate production.
• Ensure compliance with defence, safety, and quality regulations, including configuration control and traceability requirements.
• Manage production readiness activities, including capability assessments, equipment qualification, and process validation.
• Work with suppliers and internal teams to resolve technical issues and ensure component manufacturability and quality.
• Drive cost effective production solutions without compromising performance, reliability, or security.
• Assist the quality department with inspection and investigation activities.
• Develop and manage CAPEX proposals, including ROI analysis and investment appraisal.
• Perform engineering analysis to reduce test equipment and production assembly equipment downtime and outages.
• Develop best practices to improve production capacity, quality and reliability.
• Stay current with product specifications, engineering technology and production processes.
• Support purchasing with supplier management, process improvement and corrective action.
• Assist with production staff training and the development of workmanship standards in both Mechanical and Electrical teams, identifying areas of improvement.
• Adhere to the company's procedures, policies and goals, always upholding the good reputation of the company.
• Ensure full compliance with health and safety regulations and company policies, always promoting safe working practices and consideration for…