Your Job
Molex is seeking a Supplier Readiness Engineer (SRE) to support New Product Development (NPD) programs by ensuring suppliers are fully prepared to meet material readiness, capacity planning, and design change while optimizing total cost of ownership throughout the NPI lifecycle. This includes driving commercial optimization and supplier strategies with NPD sourcing engineering and category management.
This role serves as a key interface between suppliers and cross functional teams, driving supplier execution for samples, prototypes, pilot builds, and production ramp. The Supplier Readiness Engineer will not engage on all NPD products but instead focus on complex custom assembly design, new unique and difficult (NUD) technologies, and capacity/timing enabling smooth NPI progression from development through launch. This this will be a problem solving role willing to address new and complicated issues.
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Our Team
You will work closely with NPD Sourcing Engineers, Product Design Engineering (PDE), Quality, Operations, and external suppliers to support NPD programs. This role plays a critical part in ensuring supplier readiness aligns with aggressive development timelines and evolving product requirements.
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What You Will Do
• Drive supplier readiness for NPD materials, including components, sub assemblies, tooling, and fixture to support engineering builds, validation, and qualification activities.
• Optimize total cost of ownership via should cost knowledge, leverage of demand increases, liability terms negotiation and VAVE
• Coordinate design and capacity updates to support a dynamic business.
• Ensure suppliers meet NPI delivery milestones, including samples, FOT, pilot, and ramp readiness.
• Track supplier commitments against project schedules and proactively escalate risks or gaps.
• Facilitate early supplier engagement and readiness reviews to support NPI phase gates.
• Partner with PDE, MIE and Quality teams to ensure supplier process readiness, documentation, and approvals.
• Support schedule changes, fast turn builds, and design iterations common in NPD environments.
• Identify supplier and material execution risks early and support mitigation planning with PPL.
• Enable smooth handover from NPD to operations / plant teams by documenting readiness status and open issues.
• Act as the supplier-facing execution owner during the NPI lifecycle.
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Who You Are (Basic Qualifications)
• Bachelor's degree in engineering, Supply Chain, Manufacturing, or related field.
• 5+ years of experience in supplier management, NPI, manufacturing, or sourcing.
• Experience working with suppliers in a new product development or launch environment.
• Strong organizational and communication skills with the ability to manage multiple priorities.
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What Will Put You Ahead
• Experience supporting NPI / NPD programs in PCBA, machining/diecast, stamping or similar manufacturing environments.
• Strong cross functional collaboration skills across engineering, quality, operations, and suppliers.
• Ability to identify execution risks early and drive issue resolution in fast paced programs.
• Comfort working in ambiguous, changing NPD environments with evolving requirements.
• Contribution motivated mindset focused on driving both commercial and execution results via a deep knowledge of a supplier category.
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Who We Are
As a Koch company, Molex is a global leader in connectors and interconnect solutions, enabling innovation across data communications, automotive, industrial, and medical markets. At Molex, employees are empowered to create value, challenge the status quo, and make an impact through collaboration and technical excellence.
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