Exterior Lighting Design & Release Engineer

<div class="content-intro"><p>We’re ALTEN Technology USA, an engineering company helping clients bring groundbreaking ideas to life—from advancing space exploration and life-saving medical devices to building autonomous electric vehicles. With 3,000+ experts across North America, we partner with leading companies in aerospace, medical devices, robotics, automotive, commercial vehicles, EVs, rail, and more.</p> <p>As part of the global ALTEN Group—57,000+ engineers in 30 countries—we deliver across the entire product development cycle, from consulting to full project outsourcing.</p> <p>When you join ALTEN Technology USA, you’ll collaborate on some of the world’s toughest engineering challenges, supported by mentorship, career growth opportunities, and comprehensive benefits. We take pride in fostering a culture where employees feel valued, supported, and inspired to grow.</p></div><p><strong>Location: </strong>Foster City, CA</p> <p>We're seeking an experienced Exterior Lighting Design & Release Engineer to lead the design and development of advanced automotive lighting systems from concept through production. In this role, you'll collaborate closely with design, manufacturing, suppliers, and cross-functional engineering teams to transform creative styling concepts into high-quality, production-ready lighting solutions that meet performance, regulatory, cost, and timing objectives. The ideal candidate brings a strong background in automotive lamp development, expertise in optical and mechanical design, and a passion for solving complex engineering challenges while driving innovative products into production.</p> <p><strong>Responsibilities </strong><br> • Design and develop exterior lighting solutions for various vehicles, translating aesthetic styling visions into feasible, production-ready designs from concept through production, ensuring performance, timing, and commercial requirements are achieved. <br> • Collaborate and communicate technical concepts and requirements effectively with Studio Designers, Suppliers, Manufacturing, and other cross-functional teams to achieve design themes, attribute targets, and resolve complex engineering issues. <br> • Leverage expertise in plastics, injection molding, optical design, GD&T principles, tolerance stack-up analysis, and electronics to solve complex technical problems and evaluate design trade-offs using first-principles reasoning and root-cause analysis, ensuring all parts and assemblies are optimized for high-volume manufacturing. <br> • Conduct high level root-cause analysis for any lighting system faults. Investigate system-level failures, often involving reviewing communication logs (CAN traces), module diagnostics, and correlating them with the functional model to find the source of the issue. <br> • Understand lighting system architecture<br> • Lead the development and creations of DFMEAs ensuring that dependencies are effectively cascaded to relevant cross-functional partners. <br> • Support product validation plans, validation activities and sign off results. <br> • Manage Tier 1 supplier relationships including RFQ documentation, technical design reviews, and the integration of supplier feedback. <br> • Manage engineering change management, maintain accurate Bill of Materials (BOM) using Enovia, and generate and manage 3D and 2D data with Catia V6.<br> • Align engineering deliverables with commercial program requirements including appearance, cost, weight, durability, legal requirements, and program timing objectives.</p> <p><strong>Qualifications </strong><br> • Bachelors of Science in M