Lead Engineer - Product Development & Manufacturing

TrippNT is looking for a Lead Engineer to lead a small and growing engineering team.

We are a U.S. manufacturer of carts, casework and workflow products for laboratories, healthcare, operating rooms and equipment manufacturers. But we're probably not like most manufacturing companies you've worked for.

We're lean. Very lean.

Every employee has dedicated improvement time. We stop and fix problems instead of learning to live with them. We measure production in minutes. We track when Engineering causes Production to stop. We expect engineers to spend time with customers and on the production floor. And we believe the engineer's job isn't finished when the drawing is released.

It's finished when Production can repeatedly build the product correctly, efficiently and without needing the engineer standing beside them.

You’ll lead our engineering function and initially a team of two engineers, with the opportunity to help build the department as TrippNT grows.

You’ll work on everything from a new surgical implant cart developed alongside OR staff, to OEM carts for medical and laboratory equipment, polypropylene fabrication, laboratory casework, automation and entirely new products.

This is a hands-on position. You’ll design, prototype, build, test, visit customers, improve processes and spend time on the production floor.

You’ll also help us get much better at the handoffs between Customer – Sales – Engineering – Production.

We use Product Master Records and design inputs to clearly define what we're trying to accomplish before designing it. We want engineers who understand the customer's workflow and problem—not engineers who simply turn someone's sketch into CAD.

Today, one of our cart production lines produces roughly 6,500 productive minutes per month.

Our long-term target is approximately 41,000 productive minutes across six cart lines.

Why do we care about minutes?

Because minutes represent capacity. Capacity creates profitable growth. And profitable growth allows us to share the results with the people creating it.

We have a long-term goal of producing enough sustainable profit to distribute approximately $10,000 per profit-share unit per quarter.

Engineering has a huge role in making that possible.

A part that takes 20 minutes instead of 40 matters. A program that works correctly the first time matters. A design that eliminates a weld matters. A clear production instruction matters. A fixture that eliminates variation matters. And an engineering mistake that stops a production line matters.

We measure these things—not to punish mistakes, but because problems give us something to improve.

We're looking for an engineer who gets excited about that environment.

You should be comfortable designing real physical products and getting your hands dirty building them. You should understand manufacturing and design for manufacturability. CAD and engineering fundamentals matter, but curiosity, leadership and problem-solving matter just as much.

• Why are we making it this way?
• What problem is the customer actually trying to solve?
• Can Production build this more simply?
• Can we eliminate a part, operation or setup?
• How do we prevent this problem from happening again?
• How do we make the next one better?

We're looking for someone who can lead people without needing to have every answer, who enjoys developing younger engineers, and who is comfortable being accountable for the performance of the entire engineering system—not just their own projects.

• Lead and develop TrippNT's engineering team.
• Own projects from customer problem through design, prototype, validation and successful production handoff.
• Develop simple, manufacturable…