We’re ALTEN Technology USA, an engineering company helping clients bring groundbreaking ideas to life—from advancing space exploration and life-saving medical devices to building autonomous electric vehicles. With 3,000+ experts across North America, we partner with leading companies in aerospace, medical devices, robotics, automotive, commercial vehicles, EVs, rail, and more. As part of the global ALTEN Group—57,000+ engineers in 30 countries—we deliver across the entire product development cycle, from consulting to full project outsourcing.

Benefits

We take pride in fostering a culture where employees feel valued, supported, and inspired to grow. Location: Foster City, CA We're seeking an experienced Exterior Lighting Design & Release Engineer to lead the design and development of advanced automotive lighting systems from concept through production. In this role, you'll collaborate closely with design, manufacturing, suppliers, and cross-functional engineering teams to transform creative styling concepts into high-quality, production-ready lighting solutions that meet performance, regulatory, cost, and timing objectives.

The ideal candidate brings a strong background in automotive lamp development, expertise in optical and mechanical design, and a passion for solving complex engineering challenges while driving innovative products into production.

Responsibilities

• Design and develop exterior lighting solutions for various vehicles, translating aesthetic styling visions into feasible, production-ready designs from concept through production, ensuring performance, timing, and commercial

Requirements

are achieved.

effectively with Studio Designers, Suppliers, Manufacturing, and other cross-functional teams to achieve design themes, attribute targets, and resolve complex engineering issues. • Leverage expertise in plastics, injection molding, optical design, GD&T principles, tolerance stack-up analysis, and electronics to solve complex technical problems and evaluate design trade-offs using first-principles reasoning and root-cause analysis, ensuring all parts and assemblies are optimized for high-volume manufacturing. • Conduct high level root-cause analysis for any lighting system faults.

Investigate system-level failures, often involving reviewing communication logs (CAN traces), module diagnostics, and correlating them with the functional model to find the source of the issue. • Understand lighting system architecture • Lead the development and creations of DFMEAs ensuring that dependencies are effectively cascaded to relevant cross-functional partners. • Support product validation plans, validation activities and sign off results.

• Manage Tier 1 supplier relationships including RFQ documentation, technical design reviews, and the integration of supplier feedback. • Manage engineering change management, maintain accurate Bill of Materials (BOM) using Enovia, and generate and manage 3D and 2D data with Catia V6.

including appearance, cost, weight, durability, legal

, and program timing objectives.

Qualifications

• Bachelors of Science in Mechanical Engineering (Or related discipline, Masters degree preferred) • 5+ years (preferred) of Exterior/interior Lamp development at a Tier 1 or OEM • Experience in Lighting systems Engineering: communication logs (CAN traces). • Capable of managing the full part lifecycle, including design, engineering validation, and release to production systems. • Proficient in CATIA V5/V6, utilizing key modules like Part Design and Geometric Surface Design to generate 3D geometry, sectional data, and communicate technically sound design solutions.