Senior R&D Engineer - Polymers Center of Excellence

Advance Innovation That Improves Lives

At Stryker, we’re driven to make healthcare better through cutting-edge engineering. As a Senior R&D Engineer within the Polymer Center of Excellence, you’ll support the development, characterization, and optimization of polymer materials, coatings, and manufacturing processes that enable innovative medical device solutions for our Peripheral Vascular business. You’ll apply your engineering knowledge through hands-on prototyping, testing, material characterization, and problem-solving while collaborating with cross-functional teams to advance products from concept through commercialization.

What You Will Do

• Support the development and expansion of Polymer Center of Excellence laboratory capabilities by identifying, evaluating, installing, and implementing equipment, fixtures, and processes for prototyping and material development.
• Assemble early-stage prototypes and components using small-scale polymer manufacturing processes to enable rapid design-build-test iterations across R&D programs.
• Research, develop, evaluate, and optimize polymer materials, coatings, and manufacturing processes for medical device applications with minimal supervision.
• Conduct rapid prototyping activities to evaluate new product concepts, materials, and processes and support development decisions.
• Plan and execute material characterization and testing, including mechanical, thermal, chemical, and surface analyses.
• Support root cause investigations related to material, coating, process, and product performance using analytical and data-driven problem-solving techniques.
• Evaluate polymer materials, coatings, and surface treatments based on design requirements, biocompatibility considerations, manufacturability, and performance needs.
• Design and execute experiments to better understand material behavior, process variability, and product performance using engineering and statistical principles.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with R&D, Quality, Manufacturing, Regulatory, and other partners to develop and transfer polymer and coating processes from concept through commercialization.
• Develop technical reports, test protocols, engineering documentation, and design recommendations to support engineering decisions, design controls, regulatory requirements, and knowledge sharing.
• Apply engineering principles to solve technical challenges related to materials, processes, prototypes, and product performance.

What You Will Need

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor of Science in Materials Science, Polymer Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or a related engineering or technical discipline.
• Minimum 2 years of professional, academic, or research experience working with polymer materials, polymer processing, polymer manufacturing, or polymer-based product development.
• Working knowledge of polymer material science, including polymer properties, material behavior, processing techniques, and their relationship to product or application performance.
• Hands-on experience supporting prototyping, manufacturing/process development, or fabrication activities involving polymer materials.
• Familiarity with material characterization techniques such as DSC, DMA, FTIR, SEM, surface characterization, and microscopy

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with polymer materials, coatings, materials engineering, and/or medical device product development.
• Hands-on experience with rapid prototyping, experimental design, development testing in laboratory/manufacturing environments.
• Experience evaluating or selecting materials based on mechanical properties, manufacturability, processing requirements, and product performance.
• Experience using engineering problem-solving methods to investigate material, process, or product performance issues.
• Familiarity with CAD software such as SolidWorks, Creo, AutoCAD, or equivalent.
• Ability to document technical work and communicate engineering findings and recommendations to cross-functional partners.

United States of America Pay Ranges:

• US15 : $89,400 - $148,900 USD Annual

Health benefits include: Medical and prescription drug insurance, dental insurance, vision insurance, critical illness insurance, accident insurance, hospital indemnity insurance, personalized healthcare support, wellbeing program and tobacco cessation program. Financial benefits include: Health Savings Account (HSA), Flexible Spending Accounts (FSAs), 401(k) plan, Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP), basic life and AD&D insurance, and short-term disability insurance. Stryker offers innovative products and services in MedSurg, Neurotechnology, Orthopaedics and Spine that help improve patient and healthcare outcomes. Alongside its customers around the world, Stryker impacts more than 150 million patients annually. Depending on customer requirements employees and new hires in sales and field roles that require access to customer accounts as a function of the job may be required to obtain various vaccinations as an essential function of their role.