Durability and Loads Engineer

What You'll Do...
Be part of a Ford team responsible delivering vehicles that are “Built Ford Tough.” You will champion a team that works cross-functionally with all teams to deliver vehicles that are robust to our customers’ use.
You will track and report overall program durability health/readiness from concept to launch and beyond. Using the health data, you will be responsible for ensuring milestone reporting requirement are met, organize cross-functional teams to drive issue resolution and hold teams accountable to deliver against the requirements.  In addition, you will complete tasks that support the durability attribute related to design loads cascading and loads analysis.

Responsibilities:
Act as a single point of contact for managing the durability attribute for a vehicle program.

• Contribute to road load simulations to provide design loads for different vehicle systems such as chassis parts, body structures, powertrain mounts, and many other systems.
• Represent durability in architecture reviews and support the development of the architecture with an eye on durability performance and good loads management.
• Support loads analysis studies during the virtual development of the vehicle to best tradeoff tuning ranges with other attributes like Vehicle Dynamics and NVH.
• Monitor the CAE results from cascaded design loads and report out results through internal management reviews.
• Assist CAE and D&R teams with how to best use loads for CAE studies and/or testing to include items like understanding generic standards, strength and endurance concepts, PSD analysis, and simple block cycle development.
• Lead pre-durability planning with support from colleagues – lessons-learned from previous testing, ensuring spare parts are handled, and that the overall durability plan is aligned throughout the organization.
• Develop and maintain the vehicle level durability verification plan and program durability health chart.
• Durability Milestone assessments (Champion Program Design Reviews, and Milestone). Be the voice of the Durability team to report out the state of full vehicle durability testing summaries for milestone status.
• Interface with various functional and test teams to ensure test methods align with vehicle level test requirements, and issues are captured, raised, and resolved.
• Ensure all team deliver according to product development timing.

Qualifications:

Bachelor’s Degree in Engineering or equivalent combination of relevant education and experience.

• 5+ years Road Loads, Durability CAE, Durability Attribute, or Vehicle Attribute experience

Preferred Qualifications:
Master’s degree in mechanical engineering

• Strong experience in advanced road load simulations and design load development  (ADAMS, Matlab)
• Experience with material strength and fatigue
• Experience in interpreting road load measurements and lab test results
• Familiarity with architectural tools (C123, CSE, etc)
• Programming Skills (e.g. MATLAB, Python, etc.)
• Experience using SimCenter (LMS) TestLab, nCode and Reliasoft
• Familiarity with NASTRAN, ABAQUS, or OPTISTRUCT
• Possess a growth mindset and desire to work in fast-paced and highly technical environment
• Highly motivated and proactive, with exceptional attention to detail
• Strong problem-solving skills coupled with strong communication and teamwork skills