Sr Manager, Machines

Cooling performance limits AI infrastructure, semiconductor equipment, photonics, power electronics, defense systems, and other high-powered compute applications. JCI addresses these constraints with advanced thermal management components enabled by its Stack Forging process, which creates single-piece, leak-tight metal parts with complex internal microgeometries for stronger cooling performance, lower pressure drop, and high reliability.

This role generally requires 4 days onsite per week.

What You ll Do

As the Senior Manager of the Machines Team at JCI, you will act as a player-coach, leading a critical and diverse technical group including mechanical engineers, controls engineers, testing engineers, and technicians. Reporting to the Senior Director of Engineering, you will be responsible for both strategic roadmapping and hands-on technical guidance in the design, development, and continuous improvement of specialized, complex production machinery. Your team s work enables core Stack Forging processes through machinery for laser cutting, diffusion bonding, and coil handling, among other technologies.

Who You Are

You are an established technical leader and mentor with a broad engineering background, comfortable leading projects that span multiple disciplines (mechanical, electrical, and controls). You are a quick learner, skilled at applying engineering first principles to solve novel technical challenges, and you thrive on hands-on involvement while simultaneously driving high-level strategy. You possess exceptional organizational skills to manage complex projects and will instill a culture of disciplined engineering, technical rigor, and excellence within your team.

Responsibilities

• Technical Leadership: Act as the technical lead and mentor, providing hands-on engineering guidance for machine design, controls integration, and testing efforts across the team's diverse technical base.

• Team Management and Culture: Lead, hire, and develop the multidisciplinary Machines Team. Instill a culture of technical rigor, documentation discipline, and reliance on first principles in all engineering work. Ensure that the team is exploring a wide range of technical options for solving the issues at hand before diving in to a specific solution.

• Strategic Oversight: Define and execute the long-term technical roadmap for JCI's specialized production machinery, ensuring continuous alignment with production scaling goals and reporting progress directly to the Senior Director of Engineering.

• Development and Validation: Drive machine performance, reliability, and safety by establishing standards for design validation, rigorous testing, and comprehensive maintenance protocols.

Qualifications

• A Bachelor s degree in Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical discipline.

• 8+ years of relevant experience in the design, development, or operation of complex capital equipment or industrial automated systems.

• 4+ years of proven experience managing and leading a multi-disciplinary technical engineering team.

• Demonstrated ability to apply engineering first principles to solve complex, novel problems across mechanical, electrical, and controls domains.

Preferred Skills

• Deep technical familiarity or direct experience with equipment in areas such as laser processing, machine design, furnaces, metal joining, or coil handling systems.

• Expertise in managing projects involving industrial automation, controls systems (e.g., PLCs, HMIs), and machine safety standards.

• Experience applying methodologies such as FMEA, mapping requirements and specifications to validation and verification tests, engineering design, scrum & waterfall in the context of machinery development and risk reduction.

• An advanced degree (M.S. or Ph.D.) in a relevant engineering field.