Regional Engineering Lead, Design for Reliability & AI

Flint Hills Resources; Rochester Hills (MI); On-site; USD 120,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Koch Companies seeks an Engineering Manager to lead Design for Reliability (DfR) across a regional scope, building a high-performance team and embedding reliability into products through AI, data analytics, and predictive validation.

You will partner with design, manufacturing, quality, and labs, standardize industry-wide validation, and drive root-cause analysis while balancing rigor with time-to-market for automotive and other regulated sectors.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's in Engineering (Mechanical, Electrical, Materials, or related).
• 8+ years in reliability, validation, or design engineering, including 3+ years in a leadership or people-management role.
• Expertise in DfR methodologies, reliability validation, and accelerated/life testing.
• Proven experience engaging and negotiating with customers on test and validation strategy.
• Demonstrated ability to work across and influence design, manufacturing, quality, supplier, and lab organizations in a matrixed global environment, including leading cross-functional risk reviews.
• Strong communication skills in English (written and spoken).

Responsibilities

• Own the regional reliability strategy and validation process across the product lifecycle, embedding DfR early to drive reliability by design.
• Build, mentor, and lead a regional team of DfR engineers across multiple sites and divisions, establishing consistent methods, tools, and competency standards.
• Standardize validation approaches at the product-industry level (e.g., Automotive) for consistency in methods, coverage, and acceptance criteria across programs and customers.
• Drive reliability methodologies (physics-of-failure, accelerated life testing, design margin analysis, FMEA/DFMEA, statistical modeling) and drive root-cause analysis and corrective action.
• Lead the adoption of AI and data analytics by capturing, structuring, and analyzing reliability data across labs and programs to advance reliability prediction, optimize testing, accelerate validation, and enable continuous learning.
• Partner with divisional engineering, quality, and program leadership to integrate DfR into design and program milestones, acting as the regional voice of reliability and engage customers to align on reliability expectations, acceptance criteria, and test strategies, balancing technical rigor with time-to-market.
• Partner with the reliability test labs to execute test programs, accelerated life, environmental and mechanical stress, and failure analysis feeding lab data back into design decisions and closing capability gaps.
• Integrate manufacturing process capability, supplier and component qualification, and field reliability learning into validation strategy and design decisions, and support critical business decisions and reliability risk at product launch, manufacturing quality spills, and potential warranty/field issues.

Skills

DfR methodologies

Reliability validation

Accelerated life testing

Leadership

Strong communication

Education

Bachelor's or Master's in Engineering (Mechanical, Electrical, Materials, or related)

Tools

FRACAS

AI analytics tools

Job description

Koch Companies seeks an Engineering Manager to lead Design for Reliability (DfR) across a regional scope, building a high-performance team and embedding reliability into products through AI, data analytics, and predictive validation.

You will partner with design, manufacturing, quality, and labs, standardize industry-wide validation, and drive root-cause analysis while balancing rigor with time-to-market for automotive and other regulated sectors.