Sr. Manager Supplier Engineering

Primary Function of the Position

The successful candidate will lead a team of Supplier Engineers, to develop a portfolio of suppliers that deliver components, parts, and sub‑assemblies at lowest landed cost for Intuitive’s robotic systems. By building technical expertise and business acumen in the Robotics space including its primary commodities of Motion control (electric motors, gearboxes, brakes, sensors, and other actuators), Electronics (PCBAs, PCBs, and electrical harness assemblies), Metals (CNC machining, Castings), and Plastics (injection molding, thermoforming, reaction injection molding), Supplier Engineering leads the technical evaluation during supplier selection, works with suppliers to develop manufacturing processes for components, and qualifies these processes to ensure suppliers can deliver the quality, capability, capacity, and cost necessary to meet Intuitive’s needs.

You will be responsible for the engineering relationship with many suppliers and the corresponding spend required to establish production, as well as for the discovery and development of new suppliers. You will strive to deliver the best‑in‑class performance score from your suppliers which is derived from several KPIs of Capacity, On‑time Delivery, Cost reduction, Risk Mitigation, Product Quality and Service levels.

• Supply‑chain Strategy: Develop and execute Global Supply‑chain strategy and roadmap for long term, sustainable and resilient supply‑chain to support Intuitive’s Product strategy and roadmap.
• Supplier Selection: Conduct market research to identify trends in the field of plastics and metals manufacturing and accordingly select and evaluate suppliers to enable agility and innovation during New Product Introduction, and to enable production scale globally for products that reach broad commercial launch. Establish a strong partnership with the commodity sourcing team to incorporate commercial viability in supplier selection process.
• Supplier Development and collaboration: Drive and adopt new technologies and automation in supply‑chain to achieve high efficiency and production scale. Champion best practices like DFX, Lean, SPC, Six‑sigma, Project management, into supply‑chain. Establish clear communication channels with suppliers and manage both technical and business relationships.
• Supplier Performance and Monitoring: Partner closely with suppliers to select optimal mfg process and process controls to achieve high quality and cost performance. Develop effective KPIs to monitor supplier performance (delivery, capacity, cost, quality). Execute projects towards continuous improvements of KPIs.
• Supplier Compliance: Partner with Supplier Quality org to drive audit finding resolution with suppliers through processes like CAPA and SCARs to maintain compliance with QMS requirements.
• Supplier
  
  Risk management:
  
  Partner with Global supply‑chain team to identify various risks within supply‑chain and implement mitigation measures.

• Supplier Change management: For commercially launched products, execute Intuitive’s change management processes like major/moderate change (MCF), Supplier Change Request (SCR) and Change Order (CO) to support large scale projects towards capacity scaling, cost reduction, product quality improvement and supply‑chain risk mitigation.
• Stakeholder Influence: Aligning/Negotiating on project ownership and hand‑off points with various peer Supplier engineering groups (like New Product Introduction, Mfg Plant support, Tooling development). Influencing decisions with key partners in Global Ops (planning, sourcing, purchasing), Engineering (Design, Process, Quality) and Project Management Org.

• Proven ability to lead teams to solve complex technical and process problems.
• Proven ability to hire highly capable staff, and grow and mentor staff.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including presentations to executives.
• Demonstrated Project Management skills and ability to influence and negotiate with stakeholders.
• Domain Knowledge expertise in the plastic and metal commodity. Demonstrable knowledge of a wide range of manufacturing processes and…