Location: Tokyo or Nagoya, Japan
Salary: 15–18 million JPY (depending on experience)
Overview
An exciting leadership opportunity for an experienced automotive engineering professional to lead project engineering activities supporting a major Japanese automotive OEM.
This role serves as the primary technical and customer-facing interface between the customer and global engineering teams, ensuring clear communication, effective issue resolution, and strong alignment throughout the product development lifecycle.
Working closely with engineering leadership in Japan and global cross-functional teams, you will help strengthen customer relationships, improve development quality, and drive successful project execution across complex automotive electronics programs.
Key Responsibilities
- Lead the customer-facing engineering interface for complex automotive electronics development programs
- Act as the primary escalation point for technical issues, customer concerns, and development challenges
- Work closely with Japanese OEM engineering teams to understand technical requirements, expectations, and future needs
- Ensure customer requirements are accurately interpreted and effectively communicated to global engineering teams
- Support timely, high-quality responses to customer inquiries and technical issues
- Drive transparent communication between customer engineering teams and global development organizations
- Partner with engineering leadership to improve development quality, issue resolution, and project execution
- Identify opportunities to improve engineering processes, customer engagement, and cross-functional collaboration
- Coach and mentor global engineering teams on customer expectations and effective communication with Japanese OEMs
- Support cross-functional collaboration across engineering, project management, quality, and commercial teams
- Build and maintain long-term relationships with customer stakeholders ranging from engineering teams through senior management
- Support strategic initiatives that strengthen long-term product development and customer satisfaction
Requirements
- Minimum 7 years of engineering experience within the automotive industry
- At least 4 years of customer-facing engineering experience with an automotive Tier 1 supplier or Japanese OEM
- Strong understanding of Japanese OEM development processes and engineering organizations
- Experience working within global cross-functional engineering teams
- Business-level Japanese and English communication skills
- Excellent leadership, communication, negotiation, and relationship-building abilities
- Ability to coach and influence global engineering teams working with Japanese customers
- Bachelor’s degree in Engineering or a related technical discipline
Nice to Have
- Experience supporting Toyota or another major Japanese automotive OEM
- Existing relationships within Japanese OEM engineering organizations
- Experience with complex automotive electronics or vehicle system development
- Experience working within a global Tier 1 automotive supplier
- Engineering management or technical leadership experience
- Experience supporting executive-level customer communication and escalation management
Why this role?
This is a highly visible engineering leadership position with direct influence over major Japanese OEM programs and global engineering collaboration.
Rather than focusing solely on technical delivery, this role sits at the center of customer relationships, engineering strategy, communication, and issue resolution. It offers an opportunity to shape how global engineering teams collaborate with one of Japan’s leading automotive manufacturers while supporting the successful delivery of complex vehicle technologies.
For engineers looking to combine technical leadership, customer engagement, and global project influence, this represents an outstanding next step in their career.
