Manufacturing / NPI Engineer

About the company

Jiga is an AI-native manufacturing platform that automates the sourcing of custom mechanical parts for aerospace, defense, robotics, and other hardware companies.

About this role

WHAT WE'RE BUILDING Jiga is on a mission to help engineers build physical products faster. The problem: engineers designing physical products waste weeks chasing quotes, vetting suppliers, managing freight, and recovering from bad parts. Jiga fixes this by connecting engineers directly with vetted manufacturers (CNC, sheet metal, injection molding, 3D printing, castings) and running the entire supply chain on their behalf — from RFQ to the loading dock. We're a small, fully-funded, cashflow-positive team serving enterprise customers across hardware, industrial, robotics, defense, and aerospace. THE ROLE Our customers are increasingly bringing us production work — not just one-off prototypes. They want us to take a part from first article through low-volume to mass production without losing geometry, blowing tolerances, or surprising them on price. We’ve been doing this, and we’ve been doing it well enough to win serious programs. To take the next step and run this work at scale, we need someone who lives in the engineering process, owns it, and makes it run. We’re hiring a Manufacturing / NPI Engineer to be the technical and process spine that makes production-class work repeatable. You'll own the engineering side of new-program introduction: design-for-manufacture review, first-article inspection planning, configuration and revision control, qualification protocols, and the technical project management that gets a customer from ‘prototype that worked’ to ‘production run we trust.’ You won’t run a machine — our manufacturing partners do that — but you will be the person customers, suppliers, and our internal team trust when the question is: ‘is this part ready to scale, and what do we need to do to make sure it stays right at 1,000 units, 10,000 units, and beyond?’ Equally important: this role is the engineering connective tissue between Jiga and our manufacturing partners. You’ll build deep relationships with our suppliers — aligning on process, transferring knowledge in both directions, and making sure execution on the shop floor matches what was agreed at the engineering table. The best work happens when the supplier knows you, trusts you, and brings you problems early. The goal of this role is not to be the most technical engineer in the room. The goal is to be excellent at process — designing it, enforcing it, and verifying that it actually works on real parts. This is a US-based, customer-facing engineering role. Some travel is part of the job — to customer sites for design reviews and program kickoffs, and to supplier sites for alignment and execution support — but it isn’t the majority of the work. HOW WE ACTUALLY WORK We're a small remote team made up of the best of the best. Our team members are distributed around the globe — most of our product and engineering talent sits in Europe and Israel, our operators sit across the US, EU, and Asia. Most of our work is async, which is the secret sauce of our success. - High trust, low bullshit. We don't count hours or peek over your shoulder on Slack. We trust you to get your work done and tell us when something's wrong. You'll have real ownership over how production engineering runs at Jiga, no process theater, no busy-work meetings. - Question everything. See a control plan that doesn't make sense? Rewrite it. Think the FAI flow is broken? Fix it. Our internal motto is ‘Don't drink the kool-aid.’ We mean it. - No busy work, no fluff. If you’re addicted to writing 40-page MIL-STD-compliant work instructions no one reads, this isn’t a fit. If you’re addicted to building the process that fits the product and verifying it actually works, it is. - Actually friendly, not corporate friendly. We play games online every week. Once a year we fly everyone somewhere beautiful for our offsite. We genuinely like hanging out together — which turns out to be way better than forced team-building. WHAT WE VALUE IN ENGINEERING - Know every part cold. For every part in flight, you should be able to answer: what’s the current revision, what process is making it, who’s qualified to make it, what inspection it requires, and where it is in the pipeline. The part information lives with you — not in someone’s inbox, not in a supplier’s spreadsheet. - Process fits the product, not the other way around. Configuration control, FAI, control plans, revision discipline — these exist for a reason and we want them. The right level of rigor depends on the part, the customer, and the volume. A defense-aerospace machined housing needs more process than a low-volume bracket; both need the right process for what they are. - Walk the factory floor. You don’t need to live in our suppliers’ shops, but you need to know what their machines, processes, and engineers can actually do. The best NPI engineers we’ve met have spent real time on a real shop floor. - Verification beats documentation. Writing the process is the easy part. The job is making sure the process is actually being followed on the shop floor and producing the part you signed off on. If you can’t verify it, it isn’t happening. - Talk like an engineer to engineers. Our customers are engineers at the best hardware companies in the world. You’ll be on calls with them every week. They want a peer, not a project manager reading from a script. The same applies with our supplier engineers — they bring their best work to people who speak their language. WHAT YOU'LL DO OWN THE NPI FUNNEL FROM RFQ TO PRODUCTION - Be the technical owner on every program that has a path to production — from initial RFQ review through prototype, qualification builds, and ramp to volume. - Run structured DFM reviews on incoming production candidates. Surface manufacturability issues before they become quoting issues, supplier issues, or customer issues. - Define the process to move a part from prototype tooling to production tooling — including when soft tooling stays good enough,