Engineering Manager Consumer Product Development
Location: St. Louis, MO — Tower Grove area
Compensation: $130,000–$150,000 annually
Employment Type: Full-time
We are seeking a hands-on Engineering Manager to lead a small, high-performing product development team supporting a growing portfolio of infant care and consumer products.
This is a player-coach opportunity for an engineering leader who enjoys balancing technical problem-solving, people development, and program execution. You will own engineering priorities and project timelines, provide technical direction on active product programs, and help ensure new products are ready for validation, production, and launch.
The ideal candidate brings strong mechanical and electromechanical product-development experience, sound judgment around risk and validation, and the ability to lead across Engineering, Quality, Operations, Sourcing, Regulatory, and Marketing.
What You’ll Do
• Lead, coach, and develop a team of Project Engineers and the Engineering Lab Manager.
• Serve as a hands-on player-coach, contributing directly to technical work while providing leadership, direction, and accountability across the team.
• Balance workload and assignments based on program priorities, team capacity, technical skill fit, and employee development goals.
• Lead recurring team planning meetings to align priorities, identify blockers, and track commitments.
• Set clear expectations, provide regular feedback, and support professional growth for engineering team members.
• Foster a collaborative, practical, and accountable engineering culture.
Project and Program Management
• Own engineering project plans, technical milestones, and product-readiness activities across the product portfolio.
• Oversee the development and maintenance of Engineering Product Requirements Documents.
• Plan and lead critical design reviews at defined program milestones; document decisions, risks, owners, and action items through closure.
• Align engineering deliverables with the broader phase-gate development process.
• Identify, communicate, and escalate risks to schedule, cost, quality, compliance, or manufacturability early.
• Coordinate engineering support for contract manufacturing partners and internal production operations, including design transfer, issue resolution, and launch readiness.
Technical Leadership and Design Integrity
• Provide technical leadership for mechanical, electromechanical, and electrical consumer-product designs, including feeding, warming, sterilization, soothing, and related infant-care categories.
• Review designs for functionality, safety, manufacturability, cost, durability, serviceability, and consumer usability.
• Guide the team toward robust, manufacturable, and commercially viable design solutions.
• Contribute directly to concept development, CAD, drawings, prototyping, root-cause analysis, troubleshooting, and design refinement as needed.
• Support intellectual property activities, including invention disclosures and technical design documentation.
• Establish and reinforce effective engineering practices for design documentation, technical reviews, change control, and decision-making.
Risk, Validation, and Compliance
• Own DFMEA development and management and support broader FMEA activities across product programs.
• Ensure verification and validation testing is appropriately planned, executed, documented, and completed before design release and production launch.
• Partner with Quality and Regulatory teams to ensure products meet applicable safety, material, and regulatory requirements for infant and food-contact products.
• Support compliance with relevant standards and requirements, which may include CPSC, FDA food-contact requirements, EN 14350, EN 1400, UL, FCC, and CE.
• Ensure engineering documentation—including requirements, drawings, BOMs, test protocols, test reports, and change records—is complete, controlled, traceable, and audit-ready.
Engineering Lab Leadership
• Provide direction and support to the engineering laboratory through the Lab Manager.
• Help prioritize laboratory testing activities to align available capacity with product-development timelines, validation needs, and production priorities.
• Ensure lab resources, test methods, and documentation practices support timely, reliable engineering decisions.
Cross-Functional Partnership
• Partner closely with the VP of Engineering & Manufacturing on program status, resource planning, technical decisions, and risk management.
• Serve as the primary engineering point of contact for Marketing, Quality, Operations, Sourcing, and Regulatory.
• Translate technical concepts, risks, tradeoffs, and recommendations into clear, actionable updates for nontechnical stakeholders.
• Align engineering priorities, resource needs, and program timelines with broader business objectives.
• Communicate clearly, consistently, and professionally across all levels of the organization.
Qualifications
Required
• Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Manufacturing Engineering, Industrial Design Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
• 7+ years of progressive experience in product development, mechanical design, electromechanical design, or consumer-product engineering.
• 2+ years of experience leading, mentoring, supervising, or providing technical direction to engineers or technical teams.
• Experience taking physical products from concept through design, prototype, validation, design release, and manufacturing launch.
• Strong understanding of engineering fundamentals, including requirements definition, CAD, drawings, BOMs, prototyping, testing, DFMEA/FMEA, verification, and validation.
• Experience collaborating with suppliers, contract manufacturers, and/or production teams.
• Demonstrated ability to manage multiple projects, deadlines, and competing priorities.
• Strong communication and cross-functional collaboration skills.
Preferred
• Experience in infant care, juvenile products, small appliances, food-contact products, consumer durables, or another regulated consumer-product category.
• Experience with plastic and molded components, electronics, heating elements, battery-powered products, or electromechanical assemblies.
• Familiarity with product safety, material, and regulatory standards such as CPSC, FDA food-contact requirements, UL, FCC, CE, EN 14350, and EN 1400.
• Experience with SolidWorks or comparable 3D CAD software.
• Experience with engineering change control, product lifecycle management, and document-control systems.
• Experience supporting intellectual property documentation or invention-disclosure processes.
