Plant Quality Manager

Plant Quality Manager

Proterra offers a dynamic and supportive workplace where our employees can thrive personally and professionally. With cutting-edge facilities and groundbreaking projects, Proterra offers unique opportunities to grow, collaborate, and lead transformative change in the electrification of heavy-duty transportation and equipment.

Our commitment to innovation extends beyond our battery solutions to our people, where we create an environment where everyone feels valued, supported, and empowered to drive change for the earth. Here at Proterra we strive to foster a culture of inclusivity, valuing diverse perspectives and encouraging bold ideas, allowing our employees to bring their full selves to work. Our employees benefit from competitive total rewards packages, and opportunities to develop professionally.

The Plant Quality Manager is a critical operations leader responsible for owning plant quality end-to-end strategy, execution, and results. This role leads all aspects of quality management within an EV battery manufacturing facility, ensuring products meet internal specifications, customer requirements, and applicable regulatory and safety standards. The Plant Quality Manager drives a culture of continuous improvement, builds and sustains high-performing quality teams, and serves as the key quality partner to production, engineering, supply chain, and customers.

This is a highly visible, floor-present leadership role. Success requires the ability to operate simultaneously at a strategic level designing and executing the plant quality strategy and at a hands-on level, actively engaging on the production floor to identify defects, drive root cause resolution, and ensure corrective actions are implemented and sustained.

Quality Ownership & Strategic Leadership

• Own the plant quality strategy including its design, execution effectiveness, and measurable outcomes
• Define, communicate, and align the organization to quality standards at every level of the operation
• Connect quality metrics directly to plant production goals and customer impact
• Anticipate quality risks before they become customer issues; lead preventive quality, not just reactive fixes
• Treat internal defects with the same urgency as if the customer had already received them
• Review warranty data, customer complaints, and audit feedback regularly; drive systemic corrective action
• Align supervisors and leads to the quality strategy ensuring teams understand how their daily work impacts overall quality outcomes
• Celebrate quality wins and reinforce expectations consistently across the organization
• End-to-end ownership of incoming inspection including criteria definition in partnership with Engineering and Supply Chain Incoming defect tracking by supplier to drive corrective actions and adjust inspection frequency Escalation expectations when incoming defects threaten production or customer commitments

Quick Response Quality Control (QRQC)

• Establish, own, and continuously improve the plant QRQC process as a foundational function to protect production
• Review and document all issues raised by the line or identified by Quality Technicians every shift
• Identify duplicate issues, repeat failures, safety-critical items, and training-related defects
• Issue quality alerts with urgency operators must receive timely, clear feedback to prevent recurrence
• Ensure neighbor checks are in place and designed to prevent known failure modes
• Actively participate in morning stand-ups to review issues with operators and cross-functional teams
• Ensure QRQC findings drive root cause analysis and effective corrective actions not just containment
• Escalate immediately when resources or cross-functional support are needed to drive resolution

KPI Management & Data-Driven Decision Making

• Define and own plant quality KPIs including First Pass Yield (FPY), scrap rate, and QRQC audit findings
• Capture quality metrics in real time; structure data to enable trend analysis, Pareto review, root cause identification, and corrective action tracking
• Review performance daily and weekly; adjust actions proactively based on data trends

Root Cause Analysis & Continuous Improvement

• Personally sponsor and lead major corrective actions; ensure 8D and 5-Why analyses are thorough not surface level
• Verify effectiveness checks are completed and improvements are sustained over time
• Standardize proven improvements across all lines to prevent recurrence
• Drive incoming inspection processes with urgency; establish clear workload prioritization by risk and priority
• Lead continuous improvement initiatives that simplify processes and reduce burden on the quality team
• Break larger improvement initiatives into achievable milestones; drive forward quickly without waiting for a perfect solution

Standard Work Establishment & Enforcement

• Establish and enforce standard work for all quality team functions including expected task durations, shift responsibilities, and daily targets
• Ensure team members have clear visibility to the production schedule and understand daily and weekly targets
• Ensure standard work is executed at 100%; track and report team performance against standard
• Define escalation paths for when standard work cannot be completed due to resource, material, or process constraints

Team Leadership & Resource Management

• Lead, develop, and hold accountable a team of Quality Technicians, Quality Tech Supervisors, and quality support staff
• Establish clear daily, weekly, and monthly goals for each team member aligned to production targets and quality strategy
• Understand team capacity and workload; flex resources dynamically to meet daily business needs and priorities
• Develop and maintain a team training plan identifying internal skill gaps and external training requirements
• Ensure team members attend morning stand-ups with awareness of production goals
• Recognize and celebrate milestones; build a team culture of accountability, ownership, and continuous improvement
• Model belief, focus, and commitment to results lead with facts, clarity, and solutions
• Manage personal and team communications with professionalism; maintain solution-oriented dialogue in all settings

Communication & Cross-Functional Partnership

• Come to all meetings morning stand-ups, end-of-day calls, and leadership reviews prepared with concise, data-driven updates focused on next steps and disposition
• Proactively push quality data to the organization without being prompted, including:
• Repeat QRQC findings
• Quality alerts and containment status
• Environmental monitoring data (e.g., humidity) with documented findings and escalation paths
• Floor testing data trends and recommendations
• Lead discussions that are action-oriented, forward-looking, and centered on ownership and measurable results
• Escalate effectively when cross-functional support from Engineering, Supply Chain, or Operations is needed and is not forthcoming
• Partner with Engineering on quality-by-design and supplier quality development
• Serve as the primary quality interface for customer audits, customer complaints, and external quality reviews

Performance Expectations

• FPY, scrap rate and QRQC audit findings trending positively on a defined cadence
• Zero open corrective actions aging beyond defined thresholds without documented escalation and owner accountability
• Weekly quality reports delivered consistently and on time with accurate, real-time data
• QRQC process functioning daily with documented issue review, quality alert issuance, and line communication
• Team members can articulate their daily goals, standard work responsibilities, and how their work connects to plant quality outcomes
• Quality alerts are proactively generated by the quality team not reactively requested by operations or leadership
• Monthly quality review presented with full command of data, trends, open actions, and forward-looking strategy
• Cross-functional partners describe quality communication as timely, data-driven, clear, and solution-oriented

Your Experience Includes:

• Bachelor's degree in engineering, Quality Management, Manufacturing, or a related technical field
• 5+ years of quality management experience in a manufacturing environment, with at least 2 years in a leadership role
• Demonstrated experience with QRQC, 8D, 5-Why, Pareto analysis, and structured root cause methodologies
• Proven ability to define, track, and act on quality KPIs including FPY, scrap, and defect rate metrics
• Experience establishing standard work and accountability systems for quality teams
• Strong working knowledge of incoming inspection, in-process quality control, and final inspection processes