Careers that change lives start here. Medtronic is a global leader in healthcare technology with a Mission to alleviate pain, restore health, and extend life. Our 95,000 employees work across more than 150 countries to put patients first — developing innovative medical technologies that improve the lives of 72+ million patients each year. Your unique talents will help shape the future of healthcare while building a career grounded in purpose, growth, and impact.

A Day in the Life

The Senior Principal Materials Engineer will work in a team environment providing technical leadership in materials science and engineering. Duties include leading workstreams of significant scope and urgency supporting materials selection, problem-solving, biostability, and materials regulations. This position will support both released product reliability and new product development teams in the identification and mitigation of product-related risks, knowledge gaps and the communication of such issues to project and functional leadership teams and leading these workstreams to risk retirement and closure. 

This role will serve as a materials expert leading technical activities for materials selection, processing, characterization, analysis, material stability, biostability, as well as understanding of process-property-performance relationships for medical devices. This role will also participate in convening technical reviews on high priority programs, ensuring risks are captured and a clear path to closure identified.  

This role will support scoping/planning of product strategy and identification of technologies and initiatives needed to develop innovative, reliable and cost-effective therapies. This role will develop and execute strategies to address those needs. 

At Medtronic, we bring bold ideas forward with speed and decisiveness to put patients first in everything we do. In-person exchanges are invaluable to our work. We are working onsite a minimum of 4 days per week as part of our commitment to fostering a culture of professional growth and cross-functional collaboration as we work together to engineer the extraordinary. This role will require less than 10% of travel to enhance collaboration and ensure successful completion of projects.

         

         

This role will serve as a materials expert by leading and participating in technical activities supporting sustaining engineering and new product development. This role will also engage in sustaining engineering efforts to support post-commercial/legacy products. 

• Think broadly across the entire project scope to address challenging and complex problems within a project spanning a wide range of difficulty and complexity

• Coordinate and conduct laboratory work and data analysis to drive data-driven technical decisions

• Act as a technical leader within functional and project teams, driving a focus on quality and technical rigor while mentoring less experienced personnel

• Possess the necessary drive and determination to promote the highest level of customer satisfaction, quality, reliability, performance, cost, and development predictability

• Contribute to the design of products or processes based on business strategy

• Develop strategies and prepare evaluation plans in consideration of gaps in materials, design and process to achieve optimal solutions that satisfy timeline, cost and technical requirements as they relate to patient safety and product reliability

• Coordinate across the business and manufacturing to ensure mutually effective outcomes  

• Convene and lead teams to identify and burn down technical risks to support product safety, quality, and manufacturability

Preferred Qualifications 

• Experience working in a regulated environment on medical devices 

• Expertise in the following business critical skill sets with focus on materials science 

• Expertise in materials with the ability to identify and develop testing methods, correlate material properties with product performance, and predict various failure modes

• Experience working with multiple classes of engineering materials

• Experience performing failure analysis