Lead Manufacturing Engineer (NPD) Plastics, Sheet Metal & Rubber

Location: Bengaluru (on-site, with regular supplier visits)

Experience: 6 - 8 years Reports to: Head of Design engineering

About Native

Native is Urban Company's in-house consumer products brand. Urban Company, founded in 2014, is Asia's largest technology marketplace for home services, and Native builds smart home products around problems we have seen first-hand while serving millions of homes.

Native was born out of our service business. After servicing more than a million water purifiers and completing over 100,000 carpentry jobs, we understood where existing products fail and how Indian homes are actually built. In 2023 we turned those insights into products: Native smart door locks, followed by a range of smart RO water purifiers.

Every Native product is backed by the Urban Company platform. Customers buy through the Urban Company app, our trained professionals install the product, and our after-sales network services it. That closed loop gives our engineers direct insight into how products perform in real homes.

Our innovations include:

- Service-free water purification. India's first purifiers that need no servicing for 2 years, and the Native M3 Pro, with long-life filtration of up to 3 years and a 3-year unconditional warranty.
- Connected product health. Customers track water TDS, filter health and consumption through the Urban Company app.
- Locks designed for Indian homes. Designed to fit the vast majority of Indian doors, with reversible handles, doorbell-connected activation with visitor photos (Lock Pro), and face unlock (Lock Ultra).
- More on the way.
- Why this matters for this role. Our promise of years without service depends on every part being built exactly as designed, every time, at every supplier.

About the role

We're looking for a manufacturing engineer who makes sure what we design is what gets built: consistently, at scale, and at every supplier. You'll be our single point of contact for plastic, sheet metal and rubber suppliers. You'll own everything from tool review and drawing approval through PPAP and assembly line launch, and support our design engineers with plastic and rubber material science.

This is an NPD role. Your main job is bringing new products into production: setting up suppliers, tools, processes and assembly lines so they are right from the start. Once a product is stable in mass production, our production team runs it day to day, and you support them as needed.

This isn't a paperwork role. When a part goes out of spec, you'll work out why from the physics of the material and the process (shrinkage, crystallinity, springback, cure, cooling) rather than adjusting settings until it passes. If a critical-to-quality (CTQ) dimension can't be held consistently, you'll know before the tool is cut, not after the first batch is rejected.

We're a young team building our manufacturing capability, so requirements will often be incomplete and priorities will shift. You should be comfortable working through that ambiguity, making sound decisions with the information available, and putting structure in place as you go.

What you'll own

Plastic material science and manufacturing

- Be the plastics and rubber material science partner for the design team: help design engineers choose and specify the right grades, and explain how a material will behave in mass production.




- Bring a solid understanding of how polymers behave under load, temperature, time, water and chemicals, beyond datasheet values: creep and stress relaxation, the gap between short-term and long-term strength, moisture effects, and environmental stress cracking.
- For pressure-bearing parts such as filter housings and tanks, help the design team understand the material risks: long-term strength under constant pressure, pressure cycling and spikes, chlorine and chemical exposure, weld-line weakness, and food-contact compliance.
- Understand how processing changes material properties (moisture and drying, regrind, crystallinity, molded-in stress, fibre orientation) and set material and process controls at suppliers accordingly.
- Qualify alternative and second-source resins and rubber compounds with the design team, without losing performance.

Supplier development and tooling

- Be the single point of contact for plastic, sheet metal and rubber component suppliers, from supplier selection and capability assessment through launch.
- Review tool designs with suppliers before steel is cut:

Injection molds: gating, cooling, venting, ejection, parting line, tool steel, cavitation.

Press tools: progressive and compound dies, bend sequence, springback compensation.

Rubber molds: compression, transfer and injection molding, flash control, post-cure.

- Drive tool trials (T0, T1, Tn) and tool corrections, and sign off tools against design intent

Drawing intent and CTQs

- Review and approve drawings from a manufacturing perspective. Check that every CTQ dimension, tolerance and GD&T; callout can be held consistently by the chosen process, and flag risks to the design team early.
- Make sure drawing intent is fully reflected in each supplier's process: process flow, PFMEA, control plan, inspection methods and gauges.
- Define CTQ characteristics with design and quality, and set up how each one is measured, controlled and monitored at the supplier.

PPAP, launch and mass production

Your hands-on involvement is highest while a new part or line is being set up and launched. Once production is stable, the production team owns it and you support them as needed.

- Run PPAP and initial sample inspection (ISIR/FAI): dimensional reports, material certifications, process capability (Cp/Cpk), measurement system analysis (MSA and gauge R&R;), PFMEA, control plans and the part submission warrant (PSW).
- Establish robust process windows, for example using scientific molding and DOE for plastics. Avoid parts that only pass at one fragile set of settings.
- Own production readiness and ramp-up for new parts across all three commodities, including capacity, yield and delivery, then hand over to the production team.
- After handover, support the production team on process issues, deviations and improvements as needed

Supplier quality

- Be the first point of contact for quality problems at supplier end during development and launch, and support the quality team afterwards.
- Lead containment,



root-cause analysis (8D, Ishikawa, 5-Why) and corrective action. Verify that fixes work and that the control plan and PFMEA are updated so the problem doesn't recur.
- Conduct supplier process audits during development and launch.

Cost

- Build should-cost estimates for parts and tools from first principles (material, cycle time, cavitation, machine tonnage, scrap) and use them in supplier negotiations.
- Drive cost-down through design and process: material optimisation, cycle-time reduction, part consolidation and VAVE.

Must-have

- B.E./B.Tech in Mechanical, Production, or Plastics/Polymer Engineering (CIPET background welcome).
- 6 - 8 years in manufacturing, NPD or supplier quality engineering, with hands-on experience across at least two of plastics, sheet metal and rubber, and working knowledge of the third.
- Plastic material science: amorphous vs. semi-crystalline polymers, glass transition and heat deflection temperatures, creep and stress relaxation, moisture effects, fillers and reinforcements, environmental stress cracking, and how processing affects final properties.
- Ability to explain material behavior from first principles to design engineers, for example why a pressurised plastic housing can pass a burst test today yet crack after months in use.
- Strong process fundamentals:

-Plastics: injection molding and the causes of sink, warpage, short shots, flash and weld lines.

-Sheet metal: blanking, bending, springback, burrs, and surface treatments such as powder coating and plating.

Rubber: compounds (EPDM, silicone, NBR), hardness, compression set, and molding and curing.

- Hands-on experience with PPAP, ISIR/FAI, PFMEA, control plans, MSA and capability studies.
- Strong GD&T; and drawing-reading skills, and practical knowledge of measurement (CMM, vision systems, gauges and fixtures).
- Experience taking new parts and assemblies from tool trials to reliable mass production.
- Experience with 8D and structured root-cause analysis on real supplier problems.

Good to have

- Experience with pressure-bearing plastic parts, in mold decorative coatings etc..
- Scientific or decoupled molding, mold flow interpretation, and DOE.
- Assembly line setup experience, including leak testing, ultrasonic welding, heat staking or screw-driving automation.
- Experience in consumer durables, appliances, electronics or automotive. • Experience managing suppliers across India and China.

Who you are

• First-principles thinker. You understand why a material and a process produce the part they do. You can explain why a thick section sinks, why a bend springs back, why a gasket loses its seal over time, or why a pressurised housing cracks after months rather than days, and you use that to fix the root cause rather than the symptom.

• Comfortable with ambiguity. You can work with incomplete requirements and changing priorities, make sound decisions with the information you have, and build structure where none exists.

• High ownership. You treat supplier problems as your problems. You're at the tool trial, on the line, and in the supplier's plant when it matters, and you close every loop.

• Firm but fair with suppliers. You can push a supplier hard on quality while building a relationship they want to keep.

• Data-driven. You decide with measurements and capability data, not opinions.

📌 Lead Manufacturing Engineer (NPD); Plastics, Sheet Metal & Rubber (Bengaluru)
🏢 Urban Company (UC)
📍 Bengaluru