Job Title Automotive Exterior Product Engineer Location Chicago, IL

Job Type: Full Time, Contract

Expected hours per week: 40 Schedule: 8:00am-4:30pm

Pay: $46-48/hr

Job Description About the Role We are seeking a Plant Vehicle Team Engineer (PVTE) to drive vehicle quality improvements in a fast-paced automotive assembly plant. This is a hands-on, plant-floor role focused on identifying, investigating, and resolving real-time vehicle quality issues using warranty data, structured problem-solving, and cross-functional collaboration.

You’ll play a critical role in ensuring issues are quickly contained and permanently resolved before impacting customers.

Key Responsibilities

• Analyze warranty data and customer feedback to identify trends and high-impact quality issues
• Perform daily triage and prioritization (binning) of quality concerns
• Lead root cause investigations on the plant floor using inspections and returned parts analysis

• Develop and implement:

• Interim Containment Actions (ICA)

• Permanent Corrective Actions (PCA)

• Support plant activities including:

• Stop Ships / Stop Builds
• Quality campaigns and audits

• Engineering trials and running changes

• Collaborate with manufacturing, engineering, and suppliers to resolve component and assembly issues
• Track and report on top vehicle quality issues (Top 20 / VFG metrics)
• Issue engineering alerts and communicate findings to leadership

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s Degree

• 3+ years of experience in:

• Automotive manufacturing, plant quality, or vehicle quality engineering

• Hands-on OEM assembly plant experience (required)
• Proven experience leading root cause analysis and issue resolution in production

Technical Skills

• Strong Excel skills (pivot tables, lookups, trend analysis, large datasets)
• Experience with warranty data analysis
• Functional knowledge of CAD tools (NX, CATIA, or similar) for investigation purposes

Problem-Solving Experience

• Demonstrated use of:

• 8D methodology
• 5 Why analysis

• Fishbone (Ishikawa) diagrams

• Experience implementing containment and corrective actions (ICA/PCA)

Preferred Experience

• Automotive OEM or Tier 1 experience with:

• Body systems, closures, or vehicle structures

• Experience with:

• PLM tools (Teamcenter)
• Warranty / quality tracking systems
• Launch or plant-based quality support

Work Environment

• 100% onsite role within a high-volume automotive assembly plant
• Requires regular time on the plant floor investigating active production issues
• Fast-paced, high-visibility environment with tight timelines

What We’re Looking For

• Strong problem-solver who owns issues end-to-end
• Comfortable working on the floor, not behind a desk
• Ability to act quickly in high-pressure production environments
• Excellent cross-functional communicator

Why Join

• High-impact role directly tied to vehicle quality and customer satisfaction
• Opportunity to solve real-time production issues
• Strong visibility with plant leadership and cross-functional teams

Benefits: 80 hours paid time off, and medical insurance contributions, dental vision and our 401k retirement savings plan

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