Product Improvement Engineer

Ocado Group is an equal opportunities employer and as such makes every effort to ensure that all potential employees are treated fairly and equally, regardless of their sex, sexual orientation, marital status, race, colour, nationality, ethnic or national origin, religion or belief, age, or disability or union membership status.

About Us

Our teams are putting the world’s retailers online using the cloud, robotics, AI, and IoT. We provide services to partner clients globally via our innovative advanced robotics technology, known as the Ocado Smart Platform ("OSP"), this drives our highly automated, multi-million pound Customer Fulfilment Centres (CFCs). In our CFCs - together with the proprietary software applications - we operate a world-class online grocery business that automates the single pick of products, ready for your online delivery.

About the Role

The Product Improvement Engineer will contribute to automation product design activities and will be responsible for using data to influence design choices, predicting future failures, defining test strategies, executing test activities, and driving product improvement loops during product maturation.

What you will be doing 

• Define and plan test strategies for new product development, identifying key metrics, test rig requirements and resources needed to enable testing
• Support new test programmes by advising on sample sizes, statistical confidence levels and other reliability targets that need to be achieved
• Support development of future reliability rigs
• Provide validation of supplier/design reliability claims through developing and implementing appropriate test strategies
• Execute test plans, collecting, analysing and presenting results to stakeholders
• Develop predictive reliability models for new and existing products
• Quantify the impact on reliability of any design changes or cost down projects
• Use accelerated life testing & stress screening techniques to realise potential weaknesses in design of new products. Work with other teams to mitigate them
• Identify opportunities to improve or create new KPIs (Key performance Indicators) for existing and new products
• Extract useful statistics from existing product(s) in order to drive improvements both on those products and for the next generation of design
• Lead and collaborate on root cause investigations in product reliability issues
• Facilitate and lead Risk analysis and FMEA Workshops
• Lead/support the identification of root cause and participate in solution generation for issues uncovered during testing

We’d love to hear from you if you have   

• A good degree in an engineering/science discipline such as, Mechanical Engineering, Electronics, Physics or Mathematics
• Excellent numerical, modelling and structured problem-solving skills
• Experience of collating, analysing and interpreting large data sets 
• Writing and implementing product verification test plans
• Strong hands-on / practical experience of testing products
• Ability to produce and present technical findings across all business levels
• Experience of using FMEA to drive design optimisation
• Ability to work on multiple projects and manage time appropriately.
• Ability to build relationships at all levels with both internal and external teams
• Proficient in use of MS-Office / G suite 
• Flexibility to travel to Ocado’s other sites within the UK and overseas as and when required

Bonus points if you also have

• A statistics based post-graduate qualification
• Experience of using accelerated life testing and reliability growth curves in electro-mechanical product development
• Ability to read mechanical and / or electrical drawings
• Experience in managing product test activities and resources
• Experience of using Minitab and/or Six Sigma toolkits
• Developing experiments based on statistical techniques to support new product development
• Experience working with material handling equipment and automation systems
• Use of data analytical tools such as SQL, Python
• Proficiency in reliability software packages such as BlockSIM, Weibull++

What we offer you

Our employee benefits are designed for you, we care about people and we’ve ensured we have a wealth of benefits that focus on your well-being. We regularly review our benefits to ensure we are supporting our employees appropriately.

• 30 days ‘working from anywhere in the world’ policy 
• Wellbeing support through dedicated apps and an Employee Assistance Programme 
• 25 days annual leave, rising to 27 days after 5 years service (plus optional holiday purchase)
• Pension scheme (various options available including employer contribution matching up to 7%)
• Generous Private Medical Insurance (within the first month of joining!)
• Income Protection (can be up to 50% of salary for 3 years) and Life Assurance (3 x annual salary) 
• 22 weeks paid maternity/primary parent leave and 6 weeks paid paternity leave (once relevant service requirements complete) 
• Train Ticket loan (interest-free)
• Cycle to Work Scheme
• Free shuttle bus to and from Hatfield Train Station to the Hatfield offices 
• Free shuttle bus to and from Welwyn Garden City Train Station to the Welwyn Garden City offices
• Opportunity to participate in Sharesave and Buy as You Earn share schemes
• 15% discount on Ocado.com and free delivery for all employees (within the first month of joining!