Continuous Improvement Engineer

Rotterdam Innovation City; Netherlands; Hybrid; EUR 60,000 - 90,000; Full time

Job summary

Rotterdam Innovation City is seeking a hands-on process improvement engineer to run end-to-end projects on live plants across the Netherlands. You’ll decompose problems, design small, measurable interventions, and ensure they become standard work on the floor.

You will work on site with operators, shift leaders and engineers, explaining the value in their language, collecting real data, and proving benefits in euros. Travel and field presence are essential.

Qualifications

• Real shop-floor credibility demonstrated through past projects.
• End-to-end ownership from problem definition to standardisation.
• Structured problem solving using DMAIC, Lean, Six Sigma or TPM.

Responsibilities

• Find the problem worth solving by talking to operators and engineers.
• Build a hypothesis using plant data and observations.
• Design a ten-week Proof of Value with defined measurements.
• Get operators involved and ensure on-floor adoption.
• Gather real data from running lines and analyse it.
• Propose improvements with production and euro impact.
• Lock improvements into standard work and SOPs inside the platform.
• Repeat the cycle across sites to extend impact.

Skills

Shop-floor credibility

End-to-end project ownership

Structured problem solving

Data-focused

Education

BSc/MSc in mechanical/industrial engineering

Tools

MES

SCADA

OPC UA

PLC tags

Job description

The role

You have run improvement projects on a live plant. You know that the analysis is the easy part. Getting operators to trust the project, getting honest data out of a running line, and making the improvement survive after you leave, that is the actual work.

We built Oppr because most improvement projects die at that last step. The gain is real for a quarter. Then the person who knew why leaves, the SOP was never updated, and the line drifts back.

You are not implementing software. You are running an improvement project inside a customer's plant, and Oppr is what you run it with. The hard skill is decomposition: a customer arrives with a frustration, an idea or a KPI that will not move, and you break that into parts, decide which part is measurable, choose what data would prove it, design the smallest intervention that tests it, and structure the whole thing so it repeats without you. That is systems thinking applied to a live process. If you have run DMAIC, built a control plan, written standard work or closed out a Kaizen properly, you already think this way. Here you do it inside a platform, at speed, at a different customer every few months.

Most of the work is on site at customers across the Netherlands, Germany and Western Europe. When you are not on a plant floor you work from The Hague or from home. This is a job you do with the customer, not to them. Operators can tell within five minutes whether you speak their language, and nothing works if they decide you do not.

To be explicit, because the title has confused people before: this is not a software engineering role. You will not write production code and you will not sit behind a desk. If you want to build the platform rather than use it to fix a plant, this is the wrong seat.

What you will do

• Find the problem that is worth solving. Walk the line and talk to operators, shift leaders and engineers. Separate the stated problem from the real one.
• Build the hypothesis. Use our internal analysis tooling on the customer's machine data and operator observations to work out what is likely causing it.
• Design the project. Scope a ten-week Proof of Value that will prove or disprove that hypothesis. Defined measurement, defined pass or fail, agreed with the plant before you start.
• Get the operators in. Design what they need to capture, explain why it matters to them, and stay on the floor until it becomes routine. Nothing else in this list works if this step fails.
• Gather and analyse. Real data from a running line, not a clean dataset. You work out what it is telling you.
• Propose the improvement. In production terms and in euros. Downtime, scrap, changeover, first pass yield.
• Lock it in. This is the part most projects skip. Turn the finding into updated standard work, a check, a trigger or an SOP inside the platform, so the improvement holds after you leave and the lesson is available to the next shift and the next plant.
• Repeat, faster. Then the same cycle across the rest of the site, using the playbook you wrote doing it the first time.

What you bring

• Real shop-floor credibility. Process engineer, plant engineer, mechanical engineer, improvement engineer, production engineer, maintenance engineer. The title matters less than the floor time. This is the one thing we cannot teach.
• You have owned an improvement project end to end. Problem definition, plan, operator involvement, data, analysis, improvement, and standardisation. Not a piece of one.
• Structured problem solving. RCA, DMAIC, Lean, Six Sigma, TPM, 8D, whichever school you come from. And you can say what your improvements were worth, and how you knew.
• You have got operators to change how they work and make it stick. You know the technical part was the easy half.
• Comfortable with data. You can take a messy machine dataset and a set of operator observations and form a defensible hypothesis.
• Comfortable around industrial data systems. MES, SCADA, historians, OPC UA, PLC tags, IoT platforms. You do not need to build them. You need to get data out of them and know what it means, and to be confident enough with software to configure a platform, read a data flow and find the problem yourself.
• You can run several customer projects at once, with your own planning and risk view, and hold your own with an operator, a maintenance lead and a plant director on the same day.
• BSc or MSc in mechanical, process, chemical, industrial or automation engineering, or equivalent time served. Fluent English, Dutch strongly preferred, German a plus, and happy to travel to customer sites regularly.

What you are measured on

Improvements that hold. Getting the plant to a first proven result inside the ten-week Proof of Value, stated in euros the plant agrees with, and locked into standard work so the line does not drift back once you move on. Then the same cycle again, faster, across the rest of the site.

How this role grows

This is a ground-floor seat with a clear path into Implementation & Support Lead: owning delivery quality, the playbook and the engineers who come after you. It is a seat we intend to fill from within. You also get a direct line to the CEO and to the roadmap, so what you see in the field ships.