Team Lead, Systems Engineering

About the Job

You will lead, manage, and directly contribute to projects executed by the Systems Engineering (SE) team. You will provide tactical day-to-day guidance and direction;

establish team strategy (objectives, metrics, priorities, and best practices); enable the team to perform at their best, as well as apply your technical expertise to directly contribute to the technical design and operations of our projects.

The Systems Engineering team works closely with our Project Management Team within our professional services organization to deliver business value to our end users, channel and subcontractor partners, and for OTTO Motors.

SE’s design and implement fleets of OTTO vehicles and software at our customer facilities. The SE team is a major contributor to defining our product requirements and is a major influencer of our product roadmap.

Primary responsibilities :

• Contributing to and reviewing / approving the systems architecture, design, and operations of our projects,
• Ensuring quality of service and deliverables from the SE team,
• Achievement of the SE department goals,
• Adapting and improving the overall SE service and performance,
• Coaching and developing the SE team members, and
• Work planning, workload balancing and capacity planning
• Facilitate design reviews and safety risk assessments

Additional responsibilities :

• Collaborating with sales and applications engineering during the pre-order phases of planning and solution development to setup post-order activities for success;
• Complementing and backfilling for the SE Team such as
• developing solution evaluation matrices,
• overseeing vendor interactions in collaboration with the payload designs,
• risk assessments and risk mitigation planning,
• task prioritization decisions,
• product feature prioritization decisions, and
• developing system performance metrics, measurement methods, and test plans;
• Reviewing designs, SOWs to improve quality and reviewing test / experiment results to extract additional insights;
• Coordinating and collaborating with product management to define market and product technical requirements (to support the client needs);
• Facilitating and managing relationships with technology partners and subcontractors;
• Injecting creative solutions to execution plans, such as leveraging partners, subcontractors, or other groups within OTTO Motors; and
• Reviewing and directly contributing to the technical elements of contract development, drafting and review.
• Travel to customer site to lead and support project deployment and integration work as needed ( 20% - 30%)

Required skills :

• Good planner (. work planning, project planning)
• Good listener (. open to receiving feedback and implementing improvements accordingly)
• Keen eye for detail (. reviewer / editor of SE designs and deliverables)
• Strong facilitator (. team improvement initiatives, solution decision making,
• Good negotiator (. resolving priority conflicts, managing extra’ resource demands,
• Effective decision making (. helping to resolve design and / or implementation challenges for projects)
• Good communicator (. editor of SE written communications, customer interactions, reporting on SE team performance, investment pitches,
• Visionary (contributing to growth strategy, such as integrator enablement, proactive system design investments, strategies for working with key’ accounts,
• Technical acuity (. ideas contributor to implementation strategies, product features requirements, advanced toolkit,
• System design skills (technical writing, diagram creation, system analysis (via simulation),
• Systems integration skills (planning and execution of integration work, working with PMs to identify dependencies and impact to schedule)
• Ability to recognize talent (recruiting) and need for improvement

Required Background :

• 7+ years experience as a direct contributor role or technical leadership role performing industrial automation design and / or integration
• Prior experience in a technical leadership role is an asset
• Demonstrated ability to quickly grasp new technical and business problems related to manufacturing, inventory management, distribution and order fulfillment, etc.
• Experienced customer facing communicator

Additional traits of the Team Lead within the SE team :

• Familiar with industrial engineering design principles, specifically
• Facility layout to achieve good material flow
• Lean manufacturing, specifically wrt eliminating non-value add waste operations, minimizing WIP inventory, etc.
• Human factors such as ergonomics, cycle time efficiency, usability, etc.
• A creative thinker for problem solving the challenges encountered within projects
• A mind toward efficiency to ensure that the SE team and its immediate collaborators (SIM and PM) are improving the client experience and execution efficiency (productivity)

At OTTO by Rockwell Automation, we are committed to building and supporting a culture of diversity, inclusion, and accessibility.