Manufacturing / NPI Engineer

The goal of this role is not to be the most technical engineer in the room. The goal is to be excellent at process — designing it, enforcing it, and verifying that it actually works on real parts.

This is a US-based, customer-facing engineering role. Some travel is part of the job — to customer sites for design reviews and program kickoffs, and to supplier sites for alignment and execution support — but it isn’t the majority of the work.

How we actually work

We're a small remote team made up of the best of the best. Our team members are distributed around the globe — most of our product and engineering talent sits in Europe and Israel, our operators sit across the US, EU, and Asia. Most of our work is async, which is the secret sauce of our success.

• High trust, low bullshit. We don't count hours or peek over your shoulder on Slack. We trust you to get your work done and tell us when something's wrong. You'll have real ownership over how production engineering runs at Jiga, no process theater, no busy-work meetings.
• Question everything. See a control plan that doesn't make sense? Rewrite it. Think the FAI flow is broken? Fix it. Our internal motto is ‘Don't drink the kool-aid.’ We mean it.
• No busy work, no fluff. If you’re addicted to writing 40-page MIL-STD-compliant work instructions no one reads, this isn’t a fit. If you’re addicted to building the process that fits the product and verifying it actually works, it is.
• Actually friendly, not corporate friendly. We play games online every week. Once a year we fly everyone somewhere beautiful for our offsite. We genuinely like hanging out together — which turns out to be way better than forced team-building.

What we value in engineering

• Know every part cold. For every part in flight, you should be able to answer: what’s the current revision, what process is making it, who’s qualified to make it, what inspection it requires, and where it is in the pipeline. The part information lives with you — not in someone’s inbox, not in a supplier’s spreadsheet.
• Process fits the product, not the other way around. Configuration control, FAI, control plans, revision discipline — these exist for a reason and we want them. The right level of rigor depends on the part, the customer, and the volume. A defense-aerospace machined housing needs more process than a low-volume bracket; both need the right process for what they are.
• Walk the factory floor. You don’t need to live in our suppliers’ shops, but you need to know what their machines, processes, and engineers can actually do. The best NPI engineers we’ve met have spent real time on a real shop floor.
• Verification beats documentation. Writing the process is the easy part. The job is making sure the process is actually being followed on the shop floor and producing the part you signed off on. If you can’t verify it, it isn’t happening.
• Talk like an engineer to engineers. Our customers are engineers at the best hardware companies in the world. You’ll be on calls with them every week. They want a peer, not a project manager reading from a script. The same applies with our supplier engineers — they bring their best work to people who speak their language.

What you'll do

Own the NPI funnel from RFQ to production

• Be the technical owner on every program that has a path to production — from initial RFQ review through prototype, qualification builds, and ramp to volume.
• Run structured DFM reviews on incoming production candidates. Surface manufacturability issues before they become quoting issues, supplier issues, or customer issues.
• Define the process to move a part from prototype tooling to production tooling — including when soft tooling stays good enough, when hard tooling is justified, and how to amortize tooling costs across realistic volume forecasts.
• Partner with the customer’s engineering team on design questions, alternative materials, and process trade-offs. Translate between their CAD and our suppliers’ capabilities.

Own FAI, qualification, and quality protocols

• Build and own Jiga’s First Article Inspection process — what triggers an FAI, what it includes (dimensional report, CMM, material cert, finish cert, RoHS/REACH where applicable, product photos), how it’s reviewed, and how it’s signed off.
• Define qualification protocols for parts moving from prototype to production: sample sizes, inspection cadence, what ‘good’ looks like, and when a supplier earns a reduced-inspection schedule on a repeat order.
• Author control plans and inspection plans where the customer or the part complexity demands it. Make sure suppliers actually execute against them.
• Own the engineering side of customer-driven supplier audits — prepare for them, attend them where useful, and close out findings.

Enforce configuration and revision control

• Know what good configuration control looks like — and apply it to Jiga: which revision of which drawing is in production, who approved it, what changed between revisions, and how the answer to each of those questions is one query away, not three Slack threads away.
• Enforce the ECN / ECO flow with both customers and suppliers: how revisions are received, how they’re communicated downstream, how stale revisions are prevented from going into production.
• Verify, on every program, that what the customer drew, what the supplier received, and what the supplier shipped are all the same part. Catch mismatches before they become defects.

Be the technical project manager

• Run programs end to end: a customer engagement that starts with one RFQ and ends with a multi-year supply relationship is a program, and someone needs to own it technically. That’s you.
• Manage timelines, gate reviews, and stakeholder updates across the customer’s engineering team, our supplier, and Jiga’s sales and ops teams.
• Be the technical escalation point when something goes wrong on a production part. Lead the root-cause investigation, drive the corrective action, and make sure the same failure doesn’t happen on the next batch.

Be the engineering link to our suppliers

• Build deep, peer-level engineering relationships with our manufacturing partners — the kind where their lead engineer calls you when they see something off in a drawing, not when the part has already shipped wrong.
• Drive alignment up-front on every production program: process selection, tolerance interpretation, inspection plan, qualification approach, escape-defect handling. Make sure both sides are operating from the same playbook before the first chip is cut.
• Run knowledge transfer in both directions — customer requirements and design intent down to the supplier, supplier process know-how and feasibility insight back up to the customer and to Jiga.
• Be on the ground when it matters: supplier qualification visits, audits, root-cause investigations, and ramp-to-volume checkpoints. Some problems can’t be solved over Slack.

Improve the system, not just the program

• Push our platform forward as the system of record for revisions, FAI status, control plans, and qualification data — not Slack, not email, not somebody’s Notion page.
• Surface recurring engineering problems with data, not anecdotes. Then build the playbooks, templates, and platform features that prevent them next time.

You're a fit if you

• See yourself as a process engineer first and a technical specialist second. You don’t need to be the deepest CNC programmer or moldmaker in the room — you need to be the person who designs the process, enforces it, and verifies it actually produced the right part.
• Have 6+ years of hands-on manufacturing engineering, NPI, or production engineering experience at a contract manufacturer, OEM, or a hardware company that took products from prototype to production.
• Have run a real NPI program from DFM through PPAP / FAI / qualification through ramp to volume — and have at least one war story about a part that almost failed at scale and what you did to save it.
• Have hands-on, demonstrated experience with configuration control and revision management on parts that real customers buy. ECN / ECO processes are not theoretical to you.
• Are deeply fluent in FAI, control plans, inspection plans, and quality protocols (AS9102 / PPAP / ISIR / equivalent). You’ve written them, executed them, and reviewed them.
• Read mechanical drawings and CAD (PDF, STEP, SolidWorks) the way other people read English. GD&T is second nature.
• Have meaningful exposure to multiple manufacturing processes — CNC machining, sheet metal, injection molding, castings, additive — and know enough about each to tell when a quote is realistic and when it isn’t.
• Can run a technical project: timelines, gate reviews, RAID logs, stakeholder management, executive updates. PMP is not required and probably not relevant.
• Communicate in short, direct, action-oriented messages — and can write a clean engineering memo or root-cause report when one is needed.
• Are excited about a fast-moving startup and comfortable being the engineering adult in the room when a production part is in trouble and stakeholders are panicking.
• Are based in the US and open to occasional travel — to customer and supplier sites, domestically and internationally as needed. ITAR-eligible / US person status is a plus given the defense and aerospace adjacencies in our customer base.
• Are fluent in English; Hebrew, Mandarin, Vietnamese, or German are a bonus.

Nice-to-have

• Background in defense, aerospace, medical device, or another regulated manufacturing environment. Familiarity with AS9100, ISO 9001, ISO 13485, ITAR / export-control basics.
• Degree in mechanical, manufacturing, or industrial engineering.
• Time spent inside a contract manufacturer or job shop — you’ve been on the other side of an RFQ before.
• Experience building the engineering function inside a growing company — not just running one that already exists.
• Six Sigma, Lean, or equivalent process-improvement training, used (not just credentialed).

How to apply

Send a short blurb and your favourite ice cream.

A meeting lands on your calendar

If they’re a yes, I book the chat. You show up — that’s the whole job-hunt.