Director of Global Customer Quality Engineering

Company Description

Renesas is a global embedded semiconductor company focused on automotive, industrial, infrastructure and IoT markets, serving customers with MCUs, MPUs, analog, power & connectivity solutions.
In this environment, the Global Head of Customer Quality must ensure that Renesas not only meets internal quality metrics but also aligns with the expectations of strategic global customers in demanding markets such as automotive, industrial automation and infrastructure, including AI data centers.

Purpose of the Role

To be the global anchor for Renesas’s customer‑quality interface — ensuring that our products consistently meet or exceed customer quality expectations, building trust and satisfaction, managing escalations, embedding customer quality requirements across all operations (from NPI through volume manufacturing and field), and driving global continuous improvement in customer quality performance. The role acts as the “Voice of the Customer” within Renesas and links customer quality performance to business outcomes.

Job Description

1. Customer Quality Strategy & Alignment
   • Develop and deploy a global customer‐quality strategy (covering key customers, major geographies, automotive/industrial sectors) aligned with Renesas’s business strategy and growth markets.
   • Define global customer‐quality metrics, targets and roadmap (e.g., DPPM/PPM, field failure rate, customer return/return‑rate, 8D closure time, customer audit scores).
   • Collaborate with senior leadership (Product, Engineering, Manufacturing, Supply Chain, Sales) to shape quality requirements based on customer feedback and market trends.
2. Customer Interface & Escalation Management
   • Serve as primary quality contact for strategic global customers (automotive OEMs/Tier 1s, industrial OEMs, infrastructure) for escalations, quality performance reviews and audits.
   • Lead and coordinate global cross‑functional teams in root cause analysis (RCA), corrective and preventive actions (CAPA), and follow‑through to resolution.
   • Present quality status, trends, improvement plans, and risk factors to customers and internal leadership.
3. Global Quality Organization & Governance
   • Build and lead a high‑performance global customer‐quality organization: regional directors/managers (Americas, EMEA, APAC), matrixed support in manufacturing, field quality, reliability, supplier quality.
   • Define governance of customer quality across sites: NPI hand‑off, qualification, volume ramp, field support, change control, PCNs, audit readiness.
   • Own customer‐quality risk assessments and mitigation across the product lifecycle (from design to field) and across the world.
4. Embed Customer Quality into Manufacturing/Operations
   • Work with product engineering, reliability & test, manufacturing operations (front‑end/ back‑end), assembly & test, packaging, supply chain, and suppliers to ensure customer quality requirements are known, integrated and executed.
   • Support new product introduction (NPI) with robust quality gate reviews, qualification protocols, reliability validation, design for manufacturability (DFM) and design for quality (DFQ).
   • Monitor upstream and downstream quality performance and identify improvement opportunities (yield improvement, defect reduction, cost of poor quality).
5. Continuous Improvement & Metrics Management
   • Lead global initiatives leveraging quality methodologies (Lean, Six Sigma, SPC, FMEA, 8D, Fishbone/5‑Why) to drive benchmark Customer Quality performance from Customer point-of-view.
   • Regularly analyze global data (customer returns, field issues, supplier defects, NPI performance) to identify systemic issues, root causes and implement global countermeasures.
   • Drive systemic improvement in key metrics year‑over‑year and report performance at executive level.
6. Compliance, Standards & Audit
   • Ensure compliance with relevant quality/industry standards: e.g., IATF 16949 (for automotive), ISO 9001, ISO 14001, AEC‑Q for automotive grade chips and Customer Specifics Requirements (CSR)
   • Lead customer and internal audits of manufacturing/test sites, suppliers and quality systems and ensure robust corrective action follow‑through.
   • Maintain up‑to‑date knowledge of evolving customer and industry quality expectations (for semiconductor, automotive‑grade, industrial) and integrate into internal processes.
7. Business Linkage & Customer Satisfaction
   • Translate quality performance into business impact: e.g., customer satisfaction, cost of quality, risk avoidance in field, impact of quality metrics on contracts and customer