Ride Development Engineer

Job Description

About the team: The team is looking for a new member to join them in Northville, in a hybrid role. This person could be hired as an Engineer II or Senior Engineer, based on skillset and experience. 

What you can look forward to as a Ride Development Engineer:

• Responsible for coordinating ride work activities with customer, submitting ride work requests through Engineering Resource Manager, and coordinating all needed tools and components needed for tuning.
• Develop strong working relationships with customers conveying both professionalism and strong product knowledge.
• Determines required adjustments to hydraulic valve codes to achieve ride and handling targets established by the customer.
• Directs the efforts of support technicians when conducting ride work at customer locations and supports less-experienced ride engineers as needed.
• Assists the support technician in making the component changes required to achieve desired results.
• Maintains accurate change logs and evaluation notes during every step of the tuning process using the correct terminology. Organize information systematically and separately for each program.
• Completes pre- and post- tuning activities including issuing R01 (Engineering Report) after each ride tuning session, obtaining Customer sign off and effectively communicating customer expectations and tuning outcomes to project team.
• Releases hydraulic settings for production including creating valve BOMs and preparing the necessary documents for final valve codes, forces, and tolerances.
• Responsible for hydraulic function test results as part of the customer DV/PV testing including analyzing results, reviewing test specimens, and preparing test reports based on those results.

Your profile as a Ride Development Engineer:

• B.S. in Mechanical Engineering or Mechatronics Engineering.

• 4+ years of experience with strong functional/product knowledge, and ability to train others (internship/co-op included).

• Possesses good working knowledge of vehicle dynamics fundamentals for application to damper development.

• Ability to evaluate vehicle ride characteristics and associate them with product specific component changes.

• Understands function of latest ZF adaptive valve technology and is adept at execution of all types of ZF adaptive valve settings.
• Exhibits superior knowledge and execution of damper / ride development processes, both ZF internal processes and customer processes.
• Demonstrates proven skills in damper characterization and testing including damper industrialization and serial production support.

• Good organizational skills and self- motivated.

Why you should choose ZF :

• A supportive collaborative team environment
• Annual Incentive Plan
• Paid Vacation
• Personal Time
• 401k Plan
• Health Care Benefits
• Paid Holidays
• A strong diversity culture
• Supportive Employee Groups and community outreach activities