Associate Director, R&D Quality Engineering

Role Overview

The Associate Director, R&D Quality Engineering is a senior leadership role responsible for the quality engineering function across Prototype Operations - spanning prototype builds, low-volume production, supplier quality, and the failure investigation discipline that turns hardware problems into design and process improvements. This leader owns quality strategy and execution for an environment most quality organizations never see: designs that change weekly, BOMs that mature during the build, and robots that must work anyway.

This is not a compliance role. R&D quality at Boston Dynamics exists to make the organization learn faster - catching escapes before they consume build capacity, driving root cause investigations to verified closure, and building the data foundation (genealogy, serial/revision traceability, defect analytics) that tells the truth about how hardware is actually performing.

The Associate Director holds ownership of:

• Supplier Quality
  - First-article inspection, supplier capability validation, incoming quality strategy for critical purchased parts, and supplier corrective action
• Manufacturing & Build Quality
  - In-process quality on assembly lines, defect capture and disposition, MRB governance, and quality gates from subassembly through full-robot acceptance
• Failure Analysis & Corrective Action
  - The 8D program, root cause investigation standards, and cross-functional corrective action closure
• Quality Systems & Data
  - Traceability and genealogy (serial/revision capture), defect and escape analytics, process validation standards (PQP), and the quality data infrastructure leadership decisions depend on

Direct reports include quality engineers and quality leads embedded across build, supplier quality, and quality systems. The role partners closely with Precision Shop QC (dimensional inspection), Test Engineering, and Reliability, without owning them.

Define and execute a quality strategy fit for prototype-to-production reality: right-sized controls that scale with build rate and design maturity, applied deliberately rather than inherited from mass-production dogma. Establish clear quality gates across the build sequence - subassembly, integration, end-of-line - with acceptance criteria that evolve as the product does. Own the escape metric: track it honestly, Pareto it relentlessly, and drive it down through systemic fixes rather than added inspection.

Advise leadership on quality risk in rate decisions - when to hold, when to conditionally release, and what the data actually supports.

Own the 8D program as standing policy: containment first, verified root cause (demonstrated by the ability to turn the failure on and off), and corrective actions with owners, dates, and effectiveness checks. Enforce disciplined problem decomposition — occurrence, detection, and systemic causes each addressed on their own track — so investigations converge instead of sprawling. Anchor investigation priority to the top Pareto items;

resist fragmenting effort across every anecdote. Lead cross-functional investigation teams through ambiguous, first-of-kind failures where no playbook exists, and teach the organization the method while doing it.

Own first-article and process validation for critical purchased parts; qualify new and dual-source suppliers with capability evidence, not paperwork. Deploy batch-release and source-inspection strategies for at‑risk suppliers, including on-site capability development where the supply base is thin. Drive supplier corrective actions to verified closure and feed supplier performance data into sourcing decisions. Partner…