Proposal Engineer

Join a team recognized for leadership, innovation and diversity

The role of the Sales Engineer is to foster sales opportunities applying engineering expertise and methodology to transform business needs and opportunities into technical requirements, acting as the Sales Engineering and Proposals team’s technical key person. She/he shall organize all the proposal preparation process, coordinating the support from various specialists, and generate the technical/economical offer with required annexes. She/he shall exploit soft skills to build a trusted relationship with customer, with the objective to convince the customer to be engaged into a sale or project.

Responsibilities and duties

1. Understand operational requirements from customer documentation or interviews and establish the basis of agreement on what the product is to do.
2. Provide specialized advice and consultancy to customers to further analyze and detail the operational requirements to define the core of system functional requirements.
3. Map the required system functional requirements into system characteristics and architecture to select the most suitable product configuration baseline and to define the level of effort for any customization or, if needed, completely new design.
4. Complement the system requirements with program and project requirements, according to customer scope of work, deadlines, applicable regulations and other programmatic constraints.
5. Involve Design Engineering and Product Engineering functions for the in-depth analysis of technical requirements and for evaluation of the gap between existing products and target solution.
6. Perform the technical presentation for the offered product or solution, by harmonizing all the information gathered from the customer and from the supporting internal functions.
7. Finalize all the previous Sales Engineering steps into the preparation of the technical and commercial proposal, with appropriate documentation annexes.
8. Follow up the proposal evaluation by the customer and manage proposal updates, communication of additional or modified requirements, and contract negotiation.
9. Provide to Finance function the expected revenues and margins for the proposal NRE (Non-Recurring Engineering) and RE (Recurring Engineering) items.
10. Provide to Business Development function the technical and economical proposal package for evaluation and approval for delivery to customer.
11. Receive from Engineering and Product Engineering functions all necessary feedback on technical proposal preparation and the support for compilation of technical requirements compliance matrix. Receive from those functions the effort estimation for NRE (Non-Recurring Engineering) tasks and the list of technical risks with related risk level.
12. Provide support and proposals to Product Line Managers to promote the product line strategy.
13. Receive the BoM (Bill of Material) cost estimates from the Procurement function to be considered in the pricing definition of the economical proposal.
14. Receive support from Project Controller and Production Planning specialists to define the proposed program schedule and delivery dates for products.
15. Provide support to Program Management function in preparing the transition from proposal phase to program execution phase.
16. Receive feedback from Quality function on Quality Requirements for Supplier provided by the customer and for any other applicable quality, export and sustainability requirement. Receive effort estimation for quality involvement in proposed program.
17. In the initial training and familiarization phase, the candidate shall support the Sales Engineering and Proposal function for the following tasks:
18. Management of the acquired contracts and purchase orders: organizing the contract review, generating the order acknowledgement, assigning project codes.
19. Follow-on of the deliveries to customers and monitoring of the open actions.
20. Monitoring of the various customers web portals to identify new request for proposal/quotation and retrieve relevant communications about the ongoing contracts.
21. Support to the issuing of the annual business plan, managing the related spreadsheets.
22. Weekly reporting to Finance and Business Development functions regarding revenues, acquisitions and status of proposals and pending actions.
23. Acting as internal point of contact in the company for Overhaul & Repair function activities.

Qualification and skills

1. Degree in Electronic, Mechanical, Electrical, Optoelectronic, Aerospace Engineering or Physics or equivalent scientific degrees.
2. 5 ÷ 10 years of working experience, spent in design and development, manufacturing engineering and/or technical sales or similar roles.
3. Fluent in Italian and knowledge of English Language, both in writing/reading technical documentation and in speaking/listening during interaction with international customers.
4. Knowledge of Systems Engineering and Program Management methodology, with preference to Aerospace and Defence sector.
5. Past experience with embedded systems design and development is a plus.
6. Well organized and systematic to maintain in appropriate order the proposal documentation and any written (emails, formal letters, offering input and output data package) and verbal (by means of minutes of meetings and personal notes) communication with customers.
7. Ability to build trust with customers and acting with loyalty in the customer service activities.
8. Professional ethics and preparation for collaborative work in multidisciplinary teams.
9. Ability to remain focused and committed to match bid deadlines.
10. Resilience and resistance during final rush to submit the proposal to customer.
11. Optimization of time usage.
12. MS Office and MS Project mastering.

Additional Information

• JOB ID: req479940
• Category: Sales Excellence and Support
• Location: Via Della Tecnologia 2-4, Porto St Elpidio, FERMO, 63821, Italy
• Exempt