Job Description & Details
This is a heavy-hitting leadership role for a seasoned mechanical engineer who knows thermal management inside and out, specifically dealing with high-density cooling systems like CRAH, AHU, and Fan Walls. You will be bridging the gap between client stakeholders and offshore engineering groups, meaning you need both deep technical design chops and the patience to steer distributed teams through complex hardware lifecycles.
What You'll Actually Be Doing
Expect to spend your days knee-deep in SolidWorks assemblies, driving New Product Development (NPD) from the initial napkin sketch all the way to manufacturing readiness. You'll be the person holding the line on Design for Manufacturability (DFM) and Design for Assembly (DFA), while actively running DFMEAs to catch catastrophic design flaws before tooling gets cut. A lot of your mental energy will go into orchestrating cross-functional handoffs with quality, manufacturing, and supply chain teams, ensuring your sheet metal designs and structural thermal assemblies actually translate well to the factory floor without blowing up the BOM cost.
The Core Tech Stack
SolidWorks is your absolute bread and butter here—you'll need to review and construct complex 3D models, assemblies, and detailed manufacturing drawings without breaking a sweat. Beyond CAD, fluency in sheet metal design, structural assemblies, and formal engineering change management (ECN/ECR) is non-negotiable. Having exposure to CFD and FEA analysis, alongside a solid grasp of reliability tools like DFMEA, PFMEA, and IQ/OQ/PQ validation protocols, will separate you from applicants who only know how to push pixels in 3D space.
Interview Expectations
When you sit down with the engineering director, be ready to walk through a time you caught a critical manufacturing or thermal performance failure late in the design cycle and how you fixed it without blowing the project schedule. They are secretly testing your pragmatism to see if you can balance textbook engineering rigor with the brutal realities of hardware delivery timelines and offshore team coordination. They will likely also probe your depth in sheet metal tolerance stacking and how you structure modular product architecture for scalable manufacturing.
Application Advice
Don't just list SolidWorks on your resume; explicitly highlight your end-to-end ownership of HVAC or thermal management products like CRAH and AHU units from concept to volume production. Make sure keywords like DFM, DFA, DFMEA, and engineering change management are front and center in your experience bullet points to easily clear the automated ATS filters. Emphasize any past experience you have leading offshore engineering teams or acting as a direct technical interface for demanding enterprise clients.