Senior Equipment Engineer - Mechanical

As Senior Equipment Engineer-Mechanical, you will be a subject matter expert on the mechanical systems of production L-PBF equipment, including motion, recoating, and build platform systems, inert gas flow and filtration, cooling and thermal management, and powder handling. You will own technical issues and projects on your assigned equipment, set the approach and standards for recurring technical challenges, and work across Equipment Engineering, Service, Operations, Quality, and Development Engineering. You will mentor technicians and peers. The Equipment Engineering team focuses on the three areas below, and you will contribute to all of them.

• ◆Support Service and Operations
• ◆Improve existing work instructions and write new ones where gaps exist, with the goal of Service team autonomy for most day-to-day issues.
• ◆Act as a technical resource for operators and Service, including formally as part of the Service Level Agreement (SLA). This includes support for novel issues that existing procedures do not cover.
• ◆Support preventative maintenance improvements based on observed equipment performance.
• ◆Mentor technicians and operators so that knowledge from difficult investigations moves out of individuals and into the system.
• ◆Own Equipment Reliability and Resolve Fleet Problems
• ◆Take technical ownership of assigned equipment after qualification, and track performance against safety, quality, delivery, and cost baselines.
• ◆Troubleshoot mechanical issues on L-PBF equipment, such as recoater and build platform performance, motion and alignment, wear and tolerance stack-up, gas flow and filtration, cooling, and powder handling, and work with electrical and controls engineers when a failure crosses those boundaries.
• ◆Mine existing datasets to discover issues, in particular machine process data and downstream printed part data (non-conformances, witness coupons), and connect the two to find causes that neither dataset shows alone.
• ◆Contribute to trend and reliability data across the fleet, and use it to prioritize your work.
• ◆Initiate and complete RCCAs end to end: identify the issue, set short-term containment, and drive long-term corrective action. Own investigations on your equipment and in your domain, and support cross-functional investigations led by others.
• ◆Engage with Development Engineering: provide regular input on machine reliability and recommend targeted fixes with input from Operations and Service. Prioritized requests to the Development organization are an output of the team, not of one person, and you will contribute your domain expertise to the team's priority list.
• ◆Drive cost reduction through equipment optimization.
• ◆Change and Configuration Management
• ◆Help determine when and where specific changes to assets are made, and apply the team's guidance on what does and does not need formal change control.
• ◆Support improvements to both the change approval process and the configuration control process.
• ◆Document lessons learned so they can be standardized across the fleet and future factories.

Additional

• ◆Set the technical approach for assigned projects, and give clear, data-backed recommendations to management on tradeoffs.
• ◆Support installation, commissioning, FAT/SAT, qualification, and production readiness for new equipment and factory expansion.
• ◆Support quality compliance (AS9100, AMS, PPAP) and the analysis of equipment-related quality issues.
• ◆Provide input on Design for Manufacturability (DFM) and Design for Reliability (DFR) for next-generation machines.

Basic

• ✓Ability to lawfully access information and technology that is subject to US export controls.
• ✓Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering, Manufacturing Engineering, Mechatronics, or a related discipline.
• ✓6+ years of experience in manufacturing engineering, equipment engineering, reliability engineering, or advanced production environments.
• ✓Experience owning the sustaining performance of production equipment and supporting it through launch or ramp.
• ✓Strong mechanical troubleshooting skill on production equipment (for example motion, fluid, gas, or thermal systems), with working knowledge of electrical and controls systems sufficient to troubleshoot alongside electrical and controls engineers.
• ✓Demonstrated ability to lead root cause investigations using structured methodologies (e.g., RCCA, 5 Whys, Fishbone, Fault Tree) on recurring or ambiguous problems, and to verify that corrective actions held.
• ✓Strong analytical and data-driven decision-making skills, including finding problems in large datasets and not only responding to reported failures.
• ✓Ability to work and influence across engineering, operations, quality, maintenance, and service teams without direct authority, and to communicate clearly with people at very different levels of technical depth.
• ✓Experience mentoring or training other engineers or technicians.

• ✓Experience with Laser Powder Bed Fusion (L-PBF) or other metal additive manufacturing technologies.
• ✓Experience with mechanical subsystems common to L-PBF and similar equipment, such as recoating or powder handling, precision motion and alignment, inert gas flow and filtration, chillers and thermal management, or vacuum and pressure systems.
• ✓Experience with GD&T, tolerance analysis, and CAD (for example S