Sr. Supplier Mfg Engineer, Project Kuiper

Project Kuiper is Amazon's low Earth orbit satellite broadband network. Its mission is to deliver fast, reliable internet to customers and communities around the world, and we've designed the system with the capacity, flexibility, and performance to serve a wide range of customers, from individual households to schools, hospitals, businesses, government agencies, and other organizations operating in locations without reliable connectivity.

Export Control Requirement:

Due to applicable export control laws and regulations, candidates must be a U.S. citizen or national, U.S. permanent resident (i.e., current Green Card holder), or lawfully admitted into the U.S. as a refugee or granted asylum.

The Senior Manufacturing Engineer (Factory Operations) applies deep manufacturing engineering expertise to internal production environments, serving as the embedded technical problem-solver for factory build, test, and integration teams. Where a traditional Supplier Manufacturing Engineer faces outward toward the supply base, this role faces inward - identifying, defining, measuring, analyzing, improving, and sustaining complex production problems that span multiple LRUs and disciplines. The engineer brings the same technical rigor, data fluency, and cross-functional leadership expected of a supplier-facing SME, directed at enabling and improving internal build capability, capacity, and quality.

Key job responsibilities

• Independently identify unframed production problems through data analysis, floor observation, and cross-functional dialogue, then lead structured investigations (DMAIC, DOE, SPC, fault tree) from scoping through root cause to sustained corrective action
• Analyze and optimize internal manufacturing and assembly processes to improve yield, throughput, and quality across multiple product lines, developing or revising work instructions, tooling, fixtures, and process flows
• Hold PLM release authority to author, revise, and release engineering drawings and specifications where changes resolve production-surfaced design conflicts or improve producibility
• Coordinate with suppliers on incoming material issues affecting the build, translating factory-floor observations into actionable technical feedback
• Leverage production data systems (MES, ERP, test databases) to characterize problems, validate hypotheses, frame issues in terms of cost/throughput/capacity impact, and measure improvement effectiveness
• Provide manufacturing readiness assessments for new product introductions and rate transitions, evaluating process feasibility, tooling needs, and risk
• Serve as the escalation point for production teams needing deeper technical investigation, taking ownership of cross-discipline problems without a clear single owner and driving resolution
• Present findings and recommendations to director-level stakeholders with clear problem framing, proposed path, and required support

A day in the life

A day balances floor presence with analytical depth. Morning starts at a build station investigating a fit issue technicians flagged, then shifts to querying MES data to correlate the problem with a specific lot or process step. Mid-morning brings a design review where you flag a tolerance stack that will create issues at rate. After lunch, you"re running a DOE on a fixture modification and collecting data to validate the change. Late afternoon means leading a cross-functional fault tree on a test yield issue that no single team owns.

About the team

The Supplier Manufacturing Engineering team sits within Hardware Supply Chain and serves as the technical bridge between design engineering, the global supplier base, and internal production operations. The team owns manufacturing process expertise across non-electronics hardware commodities, holding design authority to drive drawing revisions, resolve specification conflicts, and qualify suppliers for critical components. Engineers operate with high independence, applying structured problem-solving to improve cost, quality, delivery, and producibility across both external suppliers and internal factory environments.