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What We Offer:
Competitive salary
Paid vacation/holidays/sick time
Comprehensive benefits package including 401K, medical, dental, and vision care.
On-the-job/cross-training opportunities
Encouraging and collaborative team environment
Dedication to safety through our Zero Harm policy
Johnson Controls is seeking a skilled and motivated Product Engineer to join the Water Cooled Centrifugal Chillers team at the San Antonio Facility. This is a continuous engineering (sustaining engineering) role focused on keeping an existing, high-volume product line performing at the highest level across quality, cost, and manufacturability. This person will serve as the critical bridge between the Global Engineering organization based in JADEC and the San Antonio factory, ensuring that global designs are successfully and efficiently incorporated into production.
Design-to-Factory Bridge
- Serve as primary interface between Global Engineering (JADEC) and San Antonio factory.
- Collaborate with Manufacturing Engineering, Quality, and Production teams across factory sites on-site and remotely to resolve drawing conflicts, tolerance concerns, and producibility issues in existing product documentation.
- Participate in Change Control Board (CCB) reviews; author and process Engineering Change Notices (ECNs) with full factory impact analysis including effectivity date planning, BOM accuracy, and work instruction alignment.
- Work closely with Contract Engineering teams to ensure that customer-specific modifications to standard products are engineered within factory capability constraints.
Quality Improvement
- Own recurring and systemic quality issues on the water cooled centrifugal product line, driving root cause analysis through structured methodologies (8D, A3) and translating findings into permanent engineering corrective actions.
- Implement DFMEA updates, tolerance studies, and design-level countermeasures for in-production quality defects identified through factory audits, warranty data, or field feedback.
- Partner with the Quality Engineering team to disposition nonconforming material and determine engineering accept/reject criteria.
- Support PPAP activities for component or supplier changes that result from quality-driven engineering modifications.
Design for Manufacturability (DFM) Improvements
- Identify DFM gaps in existing product designs that result in assembly difficulty, rework, scrap, or extended factory cycle time, and champion engineering changes to address them.
- Participate in DFM review events for product line changes, representing the factory's practical assembly perspective and ensuring new configurations can be built reliably at rate.
- Work with Manufacturing Engineering to validate that DFM improvements deliver measurable improvement on the production floor.
Cost Management
- Identify and lead cost reduction opportunities within the existing water cooled centrifugal product line, including material substitution, specification rationalization, component standardization, and BOM simplification.
- Develop engineering cases for value engineering changes, provide technical justification, risk assessment, and implementation plans to gain cross-functional approval.
- Track implemented cost improvement projects against savings targets; maintain project status visibility for leadership reporting.
- Engage with Supply Chain and Procurement to evaluate supplier-driven alternatives, ensure engineering requirements are maintained, and qualify new parts into the product.
PTS and Field Support
- Provide engineering support to the Product Technical Support (PTS) team for escalated field issues on water cooled centrifugal products, including analysis of field failure reports, return material evaluation, and development of field-applicable corrective actions.
- Author and support issuance of technical communications, service advisories, and field upgrade kits as needed.
- Support occasional field visits to investigate high-priority customer issues requiring engineering-level analysis.
Other Duties
- Maintain accurate and current product documentation in PLM and SAP, including drawings, BOMs, and specifications relevant to the water cooled centrifugal line.
- Support product line engineers and engineering leadership with technical analyses, studies, and special projects as assigned.
This role demands someone who thrives in a fast-paced, factory environment. You will work through people and process: navigating cross-functional teams, using JCI engineering governance tools (ECN, CCB, SAP, Mapics), and driving alignment across functions that often have competing priorities. You will use data — from the factory floor, from quality systems, from warranty and field reports — to build a defensible engineering case for every change you implement.
- Apply deep product knowledge of water cooled centrifugal chiller systems — compressor, heat exchanger, refrigerant circuit, electrical/controls — to make sound engineering decisions under time pressure.
- Navigate the full ECN process end-to-end: from identifying the need, through design change, documentation update, factory communication, and effectivity closure in SAP.
- Build trusted relationships with factory teams as well as Manufacturing Engineering, Supply Chain, and Quality to ensure engineering changes are implemented smoothly and sustained over time.
- Use structured problem-solving tools (8D, A3, FMEA, fishbone) to drive quality issues to root cause and permanent corrective action rather than short-term containment.
- Communicate effectively with both technical and non-technical audiences — from factory assemblers to VP-level stakeholders — adjusting depth and tone to the audience.
- Operate with a sense of ownership over the product line: track open issues, monitor implementation, and close loops without being reminded.
Required
- Bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering or closely related engineering discipline.
- Minimum of 3 years of experience in product engineering, sustaining engineering, or manufacturing engineering for complex mechanical equipment — preferably in HVAC, refrigeration, or rotating machinery.
- Proven experience executing engineering changes in a manufacturing environment, including BOM management, drawing updates, and cross-functional coordination through change control processes.
- Familiarity with MAPICS / SAP or equivalent ERP systems for BOM management, material status, and engineering documentation.
- Experience with quality problem-solving tools (8D, A3, DFMEA) and demonstrated ability to drive issues to root cause and permanent corrective action.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills; comfortable interfacing directly with factory floor teams and with engineering management.
Preferred
- Direct experience with water cooled centrifugal chiller products, including familiarity with compressor staging, heat exchanger design, and refrigerant circuit architecture.
- Experience in a factory-connected product engineering role (factory product engineer, sustaining engineer, or DFM engineer) in which direct engagement with manufacturing operations was a primary job function.
- Bilingual proficiency in English and Spanish.
SALARY RANGE: $89,000 - $149,000(Salary to be determined by the education, experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities of the applicant, internal equity, and alignment with market data.) This role offers a competitive Bonus plan that will take into account individual, group, and corporate performance. This position includes a competitive benefits package. The posted salary range reflects the target compensation for this role. However, we recognize that exceptional candidates may bring unique skills and experiences that exceed the typical profile. If you believe your background warrants consideration beyond the stated range, we encourage you to apply. To support an efficient and fair hiring process, we may use technology assisted tools, including artificial intelligence (AI), to help identify and evaluate candidates. All hiring decisions are ultimately made by human reviewers. For details, please visit the About Us tab on the Johnson Controls Careers site at https://jobs.johnsoncontrols.com/about-us
Johnson Controls International plc. is an equal employment opportunity and affirmative action employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, protected veteran status, genetic information, sexual orientation, gender identity, status as a qualified individual with a disability or any other characteristic protected by law. To view more information about your equal opportunity and non-discrimination rights as a candidate, visit EEO is the Law. If you are an individual with a disability and you require an accommodation during the application process, please visit here.
