Operational Excellence, Instrumentation R&D Lead

Alcon; Lake Forest (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Alcon in Lake Forest, CA is seeking an Operational Excellence Leader to strengthen organizational health, improve processes, and elevate product development performance across the R&D instrumentation organization. The role emphasizes data-driven decisions, clear governance, and durable improvements that boost speed, quality, and employee effectiveness.

You will partner with product, technical, quality, operations, and launch-readiness leaders to translate insights into prioritized interventions,

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in engineering or related field.
• Strong leadership in Lean, Six Sigma, and structured problem solving.
• Experience in medical devices or regulated industries preferred.

Responsibilities

• Strengthen organizational health, processes, and culture in a global Instrumentation R&D organization.
• Lead Lean and problem-solving initiatives to improve flow, speed, and quality.
• Partner with product, technical, quality, operations, and launch-readiness leaders to drive improvements and sustain value.

Skills

Fluent English

Education

Bachelor’s Degree

10 Years of Relevant Experience

Job description

At Alcon, we’re passionate about enhancing sight and helping people see brilliantly. With more than 25,000 associates, we innovate fearlessly, champion progress, and act swiftly to impact global eye health. We foster an inclusive culture, recognizing your contributions and offering opportunities to grow your career like never before. Together, we make a difference in the lives of our patients and customers. Are you ready to join us?

The Operational Excellence Leader strengthens organizational health and improves how a global Instrumentation R&D organization operates across three connected dimensions: processes and ways of working, product development performance, and culture. The role creates transparency, enables data driven decisions, simplifies high value processes, builds organizational capability, and leads improvements that increase speed, quality, predictability, and employee effectiveness.

This role is on-site in our Lake Forest, CA location and a typical day would include:

Organizational Health, Ways of Working, and Culture

• Establish an organizational-health framework that provides insight into operating effectiveness, role and decision clarity, collaboration, change readiness, leadership follow-through, and employee enablement.
• Combine performance data, employee listening, stakeholder feedback, and operating observations to identify systemic barriers affecting execution and organizational effectiveness.
• Partner with leaders to translate organizational health insights into prioritized interventions with clear ownership, milestones, adoption measures, and expected outcomes.
• Strengthen ways of working through clear decision rights, effective governance, disciplined escalation, simplified interfaces, and visible accountability.
• Build a culture in which teams surface problems early, resolve root causes using evidence, share learning, and sustain improvements without reliance on heroic effort.

Process Excellence and Product Development Acceleratio n

• Establish and maintain a product development excellence framework covering principles, standard practices, decision criteria, measures, and governance across the development lifecycle.
• Map end-to-end workflows and identify bottlenecks, rework, delays, avoidable handoffs, duplicative activity, and other sources of friction.
• Lead Lean and structured problem-solving initiatives that improve flow, shorten feedback loops, simplify work, and increase reuse without compromising quality, safety, or regulatory requirements.
• Identify and prioritize Operational Excellence initiatives based on strategic value, product development impact, feasibility, organizational readiness, and measurable benefit.
• Evaluate automation, analytics, digital tools, modeling, simulation, artificial intelligence, and other technologies that can accelerate learning, increase capacity, improve quality, and strengthen decisions.
• Pilot improvements, validate results, capture lessons learned, and scale successful practices across the global organization.
• Product Development Performance
• Create an integrated view of development performance, including flow, decision latency, milestone predictability, quality, risk retirement, reuse, and launch readiness.
• Identify recurring issues across products and platforms, distinguish local execution challenges from systemic constraints, and lead cross-organizational solutions where shared intervention creates value.
• Partner with product, technical, quality, operations, and launch-readiness leaders to improve development outcomes while preserving their respective accountabilities.
• Ensure improvement priorities are tied to measurable effects on product outcomes, organizational capacity, employee experience, strategic capability, and sustainable value.

Global Best Practices and Capability Building

• Identify, validate, document, and scale effective practices across engineering disciplines, functions, sites, product teams, and relevant external benchmarks.
• Translate proven improvements into practical standards, playbooks, templates, toolkits, training, and adoption mechanisms, allowing justified variation based on product, technology, risk, and regulatory needs.
• Coach leaders and teams in Lean, structured problem solving, change leadership, and continuous-improvement methods.
• Build internal capability so leaders and teams can identify, implement, and sustain improvements as part of everyday work.
• Performance Management and Value Realization.
• Establish a balanced performance-management system covering organizational health, process effectiveness, product development performance, adoption, capabilities, and realized value.
• Develop dashboards and operating reviews that support fact-based decisions, visible accountability, timely corrective action, and organizational learning.
• Define business cases and success measures for improvement initiatives and track delivery from diagnostic through implementation and sustainment.
• Conduct post-implementation reviews to verify outcomes, confirm adoption, identify unintended consequences, and capture additional improvement opportunities.

What You’ll Bring To Alcon:

• Bachelor’s Degree or Equivalent years of directly related experience (or high school +18 yrs; Assoc.+14 yrs; M.S.+7 yrs; PhD+6 yrs)
• The ability to fluently read, write, understand and communicate in English
• 10 Years of Relevant Experience

Preferred Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in engineering, science, industrial engineering, operations management, business, or a related discipline required. Advanced degree preferred.
• R&D environment Demonstrated success improving complex product development or engineering organizations. Experience in medical devices, healthcare technology, life sciences, or another regulated industry is strongly preferred.
• Transformation leadership Proven record of leading cross-functional change from diagnosis through implementation, adoption, value realization, and sustainment in a global matrix organization.
• Methods Strong knowledge of Lean, Six Sigma, structured problem solving, process design, change management, KPI systems, organizational-health measurement, and benefits realization.
• Digital and analytics Experience using data visualization, analytics, automation, AI, or other digital technologies to improve decisions, productivity, quality, or organizational effectiveness.
• Certification Lean Six Sigma certification or equivalent practical expertise preferred. Change-management or project-management certification is beneficial.
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