Sr. Supplier Engineer, Endoluminal

Company Description

At Intuitive, we are united behind our mission: we believe that minimally invasive care is life-enhancing care. Through ingenuity and intelligent technology, we expand the potential of physicians to heal without constraints.

As a pioneer and market leader in robotic-assisted surgery, we strive to foster an inclusive and diverse team, committed to making a difference. For more than 25 years, we have worked with hospitals and care teams around the world to help solve some of healthcare's hardest challenges and advance what is possible.

Intuitive has been built by the efforts of great people from diverse backgrounds. We believe great ideas can come from anywhere. We strive to foster an inclusive culture built around diversity of thought and mutual respect. We lead with inclusion and empower our team members to do their best work as their most authentic selves.

Passionate people who want to make a difference drive our culture. Our team members are grounded in integrity, have a strong capacity to learn, the energy to get things done, and bring diverse, real world experiences to help us think in new ways. We actively invest in our team members to support their long-term growth so they can continue to advance our mission and achieve their highest potential.

Join a team committed to taking big leaps forward for a global community of healthcare professionals and their patients. Together, let's advance the world of minimally invasive care.

Job Description

Primary Function of Position:

Contribute your supplier development and engineering skills to a dynamic development and manufacturing team that creates sensing platforms for minimally invasive robotic surgery. The role requires active participation with sustaining product development and manufacturing engineering teams, ensuring that all purchased components and subassemblies can be readily obtained on time from high quality, reliable vendors. As part of this process, new vendors will need to be qualified and performance of existing vendors monitored in order to scale up business volume. Supplier and material knowledge will also be applied to maintain, update, and develop manufacturing lines at Sunnyvale, Mexicali and China locations. The candidate must be able to coordinate their efforts with the development and manufacturing teams, and be able to report progress and milestones relative to overall projects. He or she must excel in a high-energy team environment and be capable of making sound decisions when faced with the time pressures and incomplete information typical of new product development and early-stage manufacturing environments.

Roles & Responsibilities:

• Lead development and implementation of a robust, long-term supplier strategy in order to scale up sustaining endoluminal business.
• Identify new suppliers to satisfy R&D project deliverables and have potential to become approved in the future
• Based upon current supplier deficiencies, identify new suppliers for potential qualification and present information to management
• Develop new suppliers to meet ISI requirements and promote new suppliers to production status
• Use problem solving skills to propose solutions to supplier issues
• Develop key supplier relationships, managing those relationships to effectively partner Intuitive and the supplier
• Work with buyers and design/manufacturing engineering to identify vendor(s) that are best suited for purchased materials
• Provide readiness information (quality, capacity, delivery) of the supply chain for major production process changes
• Develop supplier ramp readiness plans with input from management by determining business risk based on forecast, supplier capacity, and supplier quality
• Communicate design and process requirement changes to suppliers
• Identify purchased part/subassembly cost reduction opportunities and lead cost reduction efforts in conjunction with buyers
• Work with purchasing/planning to monitor supplier OTD and other quality metrics
• Provide DFM analysis for new designs, including review of those design with suppliers, and communicate potential issues to design engineering
• Lead supplier approval process for suppliers that perform services in support of manufacturing (e.g. preventive maintenance and calibration)
• Create and process variance requests (VRs) in SAP for non-conforming vendor materials and lead processing of VRs, including participation in vendors root cause analysis if warranted
• Drive corrective actions in response to supplier defects by being proficient in the five whys, determining true root cause, corrective and preventive actions.
• Review engineering change orders (ECO) for potential supplier impacts
• Create engineering change orders (ECO) for release of supplie