Beehive Industries is dedicated to Powering American Defense by revolutionizing the design, development, and delivery of jet propulsion systems to support the warfighter. Through the integration of additive manufacturing, the company aims to meet the growing and urgent needs for unmanned aerial defense by dramatically improving a jet engine’s speed to market, fuel efficiency, and cost.
Founded in 2020, the company is headquartered in Centennial, Colorado, with additional facilities in Knoxville, Tennessee, Loveland Ohio, and Mount Vernon, Ohio. Beehive is committed to grow and advance the defense industrial base while manufacturing exclusively in the USA. This role will be located at our Cincinnati, Ohio facility.
Role Overview
Beehive Industries is seeking a Quality Engineer to lead customer-facing quality activities within our Additively Enabled Castings (AEC) business. AEC uses advanced additive manufacturing and casting technologies to accelerate the development and production of complex aerospace and defense components.
The Customer Quality Engineer will serve as the primary quality interface for assigned customers throughout new product introduction, product qualification, production launch, and recurring manufacturing. This individual will interpret customer-specific quality requirements, establish quality and qualification plans, coordinate required evidence, manage customer submissions, and drive quality issues through resolution.
The Customer Quality Engineer will partner closely with Engineering, Operations, and Quality Inspection. The role requires both technical quality-engineering capability and strong customer communication skills. The successful candidate will be comfortable working through complex customer requirements, accurately managing multiple qualification and documentation packages, communicating difficult information, and establishing structure in a rapidly scaling manufacturing environment.
What You’ll Do
Customer Quality Interface
- Serve as the primary day-to-day quality contact for assigned AEC customers.
- Develop trusted relationships with customer quality, engineering, sourcing, and program representatives.
- Lead customer quality reviews covering qualification status, documentation, nonconformances, escapes, corrective actions, process changes, and quality performance.
- Provide timely, accurate, and transparent communication regarding quality risks, issues, containment, investigations, and corrective actions.
- Coordinate responses to customer quality inquiries, concerns, complaints, and requests for information.
- Represent Beehive during customer audits, source inspections, qualification reviews, corrective-action meetings, and other quality-related engagements.
- Lead quality communications when issues could affect product conformity, qualification, shipment, or customer acceptance.
- Partner with the Manufacturing Programs to ensure quality requirements, approvals, and risks are reflected in customer commitments and integrated program schedules.
- Escalate unresolved quality issues or overdue approvals that could affect program execution or customer satisfaction.
Customer Requirements and Quality Planning
- Review purchase orders, drawings, specifications, quality clauses, customer flowdowns, and contractual requirements to identify applicable quality obligations.
- Interpret customer-specific quality requirements and translate them into clear internal plans, processes, deliverables, and acceptance criteria.
- Ensure customer quality requirements are appropriately flowed down to Engineering, Operations, Inspection, Sourcing, and external suppliers.
- Develop and maintain program quality plans, qualification plans, control plans, inspection plans, and customer deliverables matrices.
- Establish quality milestones for new product introduction, including process validation, inspection readiness, First Article Inspection, and customer approval.
- Participate in design, manufacturing-readiness, and production-readiness reviews to ensure quality requirements are addressed before release and launch.
- Apply risk-based quality-planning tools to identify potential product and process failures before they affect the customer.
- Support Advanced Product Quality Planning and Production Part Approval activities when required by the customer.
- Evaluate changes to drawings, specifications, materials, manufacturing processes, tooling, equipment, suppliers, or facilities to determine customer notification or approval requirements.
Qualification and Customer Documentation
- Lead the planning, coordination, review, and submission of customer qualification and quality-documentation packages.
- Own First Article Inspection planning and submissions in accordance with applicable customer requirements.
- Coordinate customer-required documentation, including:
- First Article Inspection and product qualification packages
- Manufacturing and process readiness documentation
- Material, inspection, testing, and special-process certifications
- Certificates of Conformance and shipment records
- Process change notifications and customer approval requests
- Deviation, concession, and waiver requests
- Corrective action responses and supporting evidence
- Source inspection, tooling, traceability, and production records
- Customer-specific forms, reports, and portal submissions
- Review submission packages for technical completeness, consistency, traceability, approval, and alignment with applicable revisions.
- Submit or authorize the submission of quality documentation through customer-designated portals and systems.
- Ensure customer quality records are properly controlled, retained, traceable, and audit ready.
- Develop standardized templates, workflows, and review practices that improve submission accuracy and scalability.
Nonconformance and Corrective Action
- Lead or support containment activities for customer complaints, product escapes, and internal nonconformances.
- Coordinate cross-functional root cause investigations using structured problem-solving methods.
- Develop and manage corrective and preventive action plans, ensuring actions address systemic causes and are completed on time.
- Prepare and present corrective action responses to customers using required customer formats.
- Coordinate deviation, concession, and nonconformance submissions requiring customer review or approval.
- Analyze defect, escape, rejection, return, and corrective-action data to identify trends and improvement priorities.
- Ensure lessons learned are incorporated into quality plans, control plans, work instructions, inspection methods, and future product launches.
Quality Performance and Continuous Improvement
- Develop and maintain customer quality dashboards and performance reporting.
- Identify recurring product, process, and documentation issues and lead cross-functional improvement efforts.
- Support internal audits and assessments related to customer-specific and program quality requirements.
- Coach employees on customer requirements, quality planning methods, documentation expectations, and structured problem-solving.
Required Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in engineering, engineering technology, manufacturing, quality, materials science, or a related technical discipline, or an equivalent combination of education and directly relevant experience.
- Five or more years of quality engineering experience in aerospace, defense, or another highly regulated manufacturing environment.
- Experience serving as a customer-facing quality representative or coordinating directly with customer quality organizations.
- Experience interpreting engineering drawings, specifications, purchase order requirements, and customer quality clauses.
- Knowledge of Advanced Product Quality Planning, Production Part Approval Process, PFMEA, control plans, and process validation.
- Working knowledge of AS9100 requirements.
- Experience planning, preparing, reviewing, or approving First Article Inspection and product qualification packages.
- Experience with nonconformance management, containment, root-cause analysis, corrective action, and effectiveness verification.
- Strong written communication, presentation, facilitation, and customer management skills.
- Demonstrated ability to communicate quality issues candidly while maintaining customer confidence.
- Ability to coordinate and influence cross-functional teams without relying on direct reporting authority.
- Strong attention to detail and the ability to manage multiple customers, programs, part numbers, and deadlines.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with castings, investment casting, additive manufacturing, machining, or other complex aerospace components.
- Experience with aerospace special processes and applicable supplier or customer approval requirements.
- Familiarity with NADCAP-controlled processes.
- Experience managing customer deviations, concessions, escapes, and corrective-action submissions.
- Working knowledge of GD&T and dimensional-inspection methods.
- Experience supporting customer audits, source inspections, production-readiness reviews, and supplier-quality assessments.
If this sounds like you, please submit an application with your resume. This could be the opportunity you are looking for to expand your skills, contribute to a winning team, and work with talented people who love what they do and take pride in our mission.
Beehive Industries offers a comprehensive benefits package that includes group Medical, Dental, Life, and Short and Long-Term disability coverage from day one. We also offer a generous 401(k) Retirement Savings Plan with a Company match. Every role at Beehive Industries is bonus eligible and will also receive equity in the company.
Beehive Industries is committed to full compliance with applicable anti-discrimination laws. We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We strive to create an inclusive work environment and will not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.