Product Engineer Body

Job Title: Plant Vehicle Team Engineer (PVTE)
Location: Chicago, IL. Onsite.
 Pay Range: $49-50 Per Hour
Job Type: W2 Contract.
Expected Hours per Week: 40 hours per week.
Schedule: Monday–Friday

Position Summary:
We are seeking a Plant Vehicle Team Engineer (PVTE) to support vehicle quality initiatives within an automotive assembly plant environment. This role is focused on urgent root cause analysis, warranty issue triage, plant-floor investigations, containment actions, and corrective action implementation in a high-volume production environment. The PVTE will work closely with manufacturing, supplier quality, and engineering teams to identify, analyze, and resolve vehicle quality concerns.

Key Responsibilities:

• Analyze warranty claim data and customer feedback to identify failure trends, emerging issues, and high-impact quality concerns.
• Perform daily triage and binning of warranty claims into appropriate categories to support prioritization.
• Conduct root cause investigations through plant-floor inspections, returned parts analysis, and cross-functional collaboration.
• Lead development and execution of Interim Containment Actions (ICA) and Permanent Corrective Actions (PCA).
• Support assembly plant activities including Stop Ships, Stop Builds, quality campaigns, audits, engineering trials, and running changes.
• Work directly on the plant floor to investigate build issues and validate corrective actions.
• Collaborate with suppliers and internal engineering teams to resolve component and subsystem quality issues.
• Maintain and report on Vehicle Functional Group (VFG) quality metrics, including Top 20 issues.
• Issue engineering alerts and documentation to support product changes and quality improvements.
• Present findings, status updates, and recommendations to cross-functional teams and leadership.

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s Degree.
• 3+ years of experience in automotive manufacturing, plant quality, product engineering, warranty analysis, or manufacturing engineering.
• Direct hands-on experience in an OEM automotive assembly plant environment.
• Proven experience independently leading root cause investigations and corrective actions in a production assembly environment.
• Strong experience with warranty data analysis, including Excel pivot tables, lookups, trend analysis, and large dataset handling.
• Experience using structured problem-solving methodologies such as 8D, 5 Why, and Fishbone/Ishikawa diagrams.
• Experience implementing Interim Containment Actions (ICA) and Permanent Corrective Actions (PCA).
• Ability to navigate CAD models such as NX, CATIA, or similar tools for investigation purposes.
• Strong analytical and troubleshooting skills in a manufacturing environment.
• Ability to work in a fast-paced, high-visibility plant setting.
• Strong cross-functional communication skills with engineering, production, and suppliers.
• Ability to own issues end-to-end and drive them to closure.
• Must be comfortable working 100% onsite and spending regular time on the plant floor.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Automotive OEM or Tier 1 supplier experience.
• Experience with body systems, closures, or vehicle structures.
• Experience with PLM tools such as Teamcenter.
• Experience with warranty or quality tracking systems.
• Prior involvement in launch support or running product changes.
• Background as a seasoned plant quality engineer, supplier quality engineer with assembly support, resident engineer, manufacturing quality lead, warranty engineer, or launch quality engineer with long-term plant operations experience.

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