Z

Zeiss

Corporate venture capital for deep-tech startups

Failure Analysis Lead

Quality EngineeringConfirmed live in the last 24 hours
Full-timeGuangzhou, Guangdong Province, ChinaNo salary listedIn-person

About the Job

Requirements

  • A bachelor's degree in optics, mechanical engineering, precision manufacturing, materials, or a related field.
  • At least six years of optical or consumer-electronics failure-analysis experience and at least two years of team-management experience.
  • Senior experience with Apple-related projects, AR/VR smart-glasses projects, optical modules, or precision structural components in Apple's supply chain.
  • Expertise in quality methodologies including 8D, 5 Why, fishbone diagrams, fault tree analysis, FMEA, the five core quality tools, and design of experiments.
  • Proficiency with Minitab or JMP for advanced data analysis, process capability analysis, variation-source analysis, hypothesis validation, and trend prediction; Six Sigma Black Belt is preferred.
  • Ability to independently establish improvement systems, design systematic experiments, and lead large-scale improvement projects.
  • Ability to break down complex problems, identify sources of variation, and develop solutions for irregular, intermittent, low-probability, or coupled failures.
  • Team-management capabilities including task allocation, quality control, staff development, risk ownership, and performance reviews.
  • Project-management and strategic-improvement capabilities, including schedule control, risk prediction, cost control, and quantification of benefits.
  • Ability to lead advanced technical meetings in English, debate technical issues in English, write advanced English technical reports, and respond to customer audits.
  • Ability to independently present technical findings, defend proposals, and communicate conclusions to senior Apple SQE, PE, and PM contacts.

Responsibilities

  • Serve as ZEISS's FA technical contact for Apple; lead monthly and quarterly senior-level reviews, quality audits, major customer complaints, mass failures, and mass-production crisis reporting, and provide final conclusions.
  • Explain high-risk issues to customers, establish logical closure, validate countermeasures, communicate final technical conclusions, manage customer expectations, and prevent quality risks and complaints from escalating.
  • Coordinate the FA team's daily assignments, task scheduling, progress monitoring, and work-quality audits.
  • Establish team-wide FA analysis standards, determination criteria, report requirements, and experimental verification processes to ensure consistent analysis and outputs.
  • Train new team members, establish skill levels, review work, and build team capability and succession to improve resolution of difficult issues.
  • Lead investigations of difficult, recurring, intermittent, low-yield, and batch process-drift failures that engineers cannot resolve.
  • Use optical principles, process logic, material properties, and statistical analysis to develop investigation approaches, verification plans, root-cause hypotheses, and permanent corrective actions; lead implementation through closure.
  • Plan yield-improvement roadmaps using mass-production data, defect stratification, failure-mode classification, and process-issue identification.
  • Lead annual and quarterly yield-improvement initiatives, defect-reduction projects, and PPM-reduction projects; coordinate PE, ME, RD, SQE, and supply-chain resources to drive process optimization, parameter control, incoming-material controls, and equipment capability improvements.
  • Participate throughout new-product development, sampling, trial production, and mass-production ramp-up; identify risks involving optical bonding, coating, assembly, stress, reliability, and environmental failures.
  • Establish NPI failure-prevention mechanisms, critical-risk lists, and trial-production FA reviews to reduce defects and prevent mass-quality incidents after launch.
  • Build a library of typical failure cases, advanced 8D templates, design-of-experiments resources, and failure-root-cause models; standardize customer presentations, technical rationale, and problem reviews.
  • Balance quality, yield, capacity, and cost in improvement plans; quantify yield benefits, cost savings, and risk reduction, and prepare customer-ready benefit reports.
  • Coordinate engineering, process, equipment, material, and supplier resources; resolve cross-functional blockers and ensure abnormalities are closed on schedule.

Desired Qualifications

  • Six Sigma Black Belt certification.

About the Company

Zeiss

Corporate venture capital for deep-tech startups

ZEISS Ventures is the corporate venture capital arm of the ZEISS Group, investing in deep-tech startups that align with its core business areas. It focuses on early-stage rounds (pre-Series A to Series A), typically $1–$5 million, across Information Technology, Industrial Tech, MedTech, and Life Sciences. It adds value by providing targeted funding and using ZEISS’s global network and expertise to support portfolio companies. The goal is to accelerate development of new technologies and business models that complement ZEISS’s portfolio, while actively engaging with external innovation.

Company size
1,001-5,000
Company stage
Growth Equity (Non-Venture Capital)
Total funding
$69.9M
Headquarters
Oberkochen, Germany
Founded
2001

Recently Posted Jobs

Explore more opportunities at Zeiss

See more jobs