Intuitive Surgical

Job Description

Primary Function of Position

This person manages a Quality Engineering group, and grows an organization that is equipped to reach across the company acting as emissaries for the Product Quality mission. Quality Engineering is responsible for developing quality metrics and helping the company applying them intelligently and consistently. Quality Engineering is broadly responsible for, or a stake-holder in Product Quality; Data Quality; Process Quality; Solutions to challenging quality problems; Design for Quality in new product; Organizational input to QRB; Organization of Enterprise data for quality.

The Quality Engineering Manager is responsible for managing the team of Quality Engineers and evaluating their results. Coordinates the support to production released assembly lines in Mexicali Operations. He or she interfaces with leaders including VPs and Directors throughout the design, operations, regulatory, IT, marketing and service areas of Intuitive Surgical.

Essential Job Duties

This position has responsibility and authority for:

• Manage group of Quality Engineers and support them through their day to day responsibilities
• Oversees the preparation of the Quality metrics presentations for QDR / QOR Meetings and analyzes the data to obtain conclusions to define proper action plans for continuous improvement
• Assess issues and Escalates based on criticality.
• Liaison with other Quality functions representatives in other Intuitive locations and with other company functions as it applies.
• Represents the Quality Engineering function in projects of medium to high complexity, Escalation Processes, CAPA's, External and Internal audits.
• Defines the Quality Engineering organizational structure to provide the required support.
• Anticipates future needs in order to adequate the organizational structure according to company growth / changes.
• Identifies opportunities for improvements on Product Quality, Processes Efficiency, Cost Reduction, and coordinates the team of QE's for the implementation of these opportunities to achieve our company goals.
• Defines and executes the development plans for the Quality Engineering team under her or his responsibility, establishing and documenting development goals and tracking its progress.
• Serving and proponent for quality across enterprise
• Providing metrics and guidelines to functions to assist in trending and improving quality
• Applying metrics to measure quality and metrics to trade quality off against other attributes of a successful enterprise (“cost of quality”)
• Maintaining a prioritized list of quality initiatives on three levels
• Product quality - Analysis of product failures and reliability opportunities; metrics; deep failure analysis; assistance in project management of projects that address said failures; metrics of improvement
• Data quality - Understanding and analysis of how the enterprise acquires and processes raw data to derive action priorities and plans; development of data quality vision and negotiation for the gradual adoption of that vision throughout the enterprise. This requires understanding of how IT and Operations manage and input quality data, as well as cost-benefit trade-offs for potentially costly “perfect data”.
• Process Quality - analysis of processes that affect product quality, or guidance to others to analyze their processes.
• Project management help for a series of Product, Compliance and Quality projects.
• Supporting New Product Introduction initiatives by assessing Quality Engineering resources needed and allocation.
• Support for deep technical failure analysis and analysis of challenging quality issues
• Generation of input for QRB, including managing the quality of other organizations’ input.
• Review of quality data collected regularly and setting of priorities
• Bioburden / Endotoxins and CER performance data trending analysis review and reporting.
• Gathering and making available to enterprise customers a routine set of quality data for their weekly use (standard quality reports)
• Revision and approval of internal documentation, including:
• Engineering Change Orders (ECO's, BCO's, NCO's, MCO's, etc.)
• Work instructions (MPI's, IVI's, QAP’s, Acceptance criteria, etc.)
• Operating procedures (SOP's, DOP's, etc.)
• Validations (IQ, OQ, PQ, PPQ)
• Take responsibility for developing and maintaining compliance with the quality system.
• Review and assign priorities to Quality Engineers when production line support is required.
• Support on the implementation of assembly lines or product transfers into our facilities, including planning, validation/verification and final implementation.
• Drive our Culture Strategy by fostering our mission, founding principles, individual and leadership expectations.