Quality assurance technician Jobs in Sioux Falls, SD

Product Assurance Supervisor

The Product Assurance Supervisor leads the engineering organization responsible for providing independent technical assurance that products meet requirements, are ready for deployment, perform reliably in operational environments, and continuously improve throughout their lifecycle.

The Product Assurance organization provides engineering confidence through verification and validation, systems integration, release readiness, product reliability engineering, operational engineering, root cause analysis, and continuous improvement driven by operational experience. The team measures product quality, identifies reliability risks, investigates failures, and drives engineering improvements that enhance product performance, reliability, and customer satisfaction.

The Product Assurance Supervisor partners closely with stakeholders across the organizations to ensure products consistently meet customer and mission expectations.

This role is both a people leader and a technical leader, responsible for building a high-performing engineering organization while remaining engaged in solving complex multidisciplinary engineering and operational challenges.

Responsibilities

People Leadership

• Hire, develop, mentor, and lead a high-performing team of Product Assurance engineers.
• Establish clear goals, expectations, and career development plans.
• Foster a culture of engineering excellence, accountability, continuous improvement, and operational ownership.
• Build organizational capability through coaching, training, process improvement, and automation.
• Allocate personnel across verification, validation, reliability engineering, operational engineering, and product development activities.
• Build strong partnerships across engineering disciplines while maintaining Product Assurance's independent technical perspective.

Product Assurance

• Define product assurance strategies for new products and major product releases.
• Lead system integration, verification, validation, functional, regression, performance, environmental, and acceptance testing.
• Ensure complete traceability between product requirements, verification activities, and verification results.
• Establish objective release readiness criteria and provide independent technical recommendations regarding product release.
• Oversee development and maintenance of automated verification infrastructure, test systems, and engineering tools.
• Improve verification coverage, repeatability, efficiency, and confidence through automation and process improvement.
• Participate in architecture and design reviews to improve product quality, reliability, maintainability, diagnosability, and testability.
• Support laboratory, field, and flight test activities as required.

Product Reliability Engineering

• Own engineering metrics related to product quality, reliability, availability, and operational performance.
• Develop and maintain reliability metrics and dashboards for engineering leadership.
• Analyze field performance, operational data, and reliability trends to identify systemic engineering improvements.
• Identify recurring defects, failure modes, and reliability risks before they become customer-impacting issues.
• Partner with development teams to improve product robustness, maintainability, diagnosability, and operational resilience.
• Lead recurring reviews of escaped defects, operational incidents, and reliability trends.
• Drive engineering improvements that increase long-term product reliability and reduce operational risk.

Operational Engineering

• Lead engineering investigation and resolution of complex operational product issues.
• Coordinate multidisciplinary engineering investigations.
• Perform and lead structured root cause analyses for product anomalies and customer-impacting events.
• Develop engineering diagnostic tools, troubleshooting procedures, and technical knowledge resources.
• Monitor operational product health and engineering performance metrics.
• Establish and lead the technical support function, ensuring effective escalation, investigation, and resolution of complex product issues.
• Establish effective engineering feedback loops between field operations and product development.
• Ensure lessons learned from operational experience are incorporated into future product designs, engineering practices, and verification activities.
• Drive corrective and preventive actions that improve product reliability and operational readiness.

Continuous Improvement

• Champion automation of verification and validation activities.
• Improve engineering verification processes, release readiness practices, and operational engineering capabilities.
• Standardize engineering best practices based on lessons learned from verification, field operations, and reliability analysis.
• Promote data-driven decision making through objective engineering metrics.
• Continuously improve the organization's ability to predict, detect, diagnose, and prevent product issues.

Cross-Functional Leadership

• Balance technical quality, schedule, customer commitments, and engineering risk.
• Provide engineering leadership with objective assessments of product readiness, operational health, and long-term reliability.
• Promote engineering decisions that improve quality, reliability, maintainability, and customer outcomes.
• Partner with Product Management to understand customer priorities and operational challenges.
• Partner with engineering teams to prioritize investments that improve long-term product quality and reliability.
• Serve as the independent engineering voice for product readiness, operational performance, and product reliability.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Computer Science, or a related technical discipline.
• 5+ years of engineering experience developing, integrating, verifying, or validating complex products.
• 3+ years leading engineering teams.
• Experience with systems integration, verification and validation, reliability engineering, or product assurance.
• Strong understanding of systems engineering principles and modern product development lifecycles.
• Demonstrated experience performing structured technical troubleshooting, root cause analysis, and engineering problem solving.
• Excellent communication, leadership, and cross-functional collaboration skills.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with embedded systems, aerospace, defense, or other mission-critical products.
• Experience leading verification, systems integration, reliability engineering, or product assurance organizations.
• Experience developing automated verification frameworks and continuous integration pipelines.
• Familiarity with requirements management and verification traceability.
• Experience analyzing operational product performance and using data to drive engineering improvements.
• Experience participating in field deployments, flight tests, customer demonstrations, or operational engineering activities.

Operational Readiness & Incident Response

Our products support mission-critical operations where engineering expertise may occasionally be required outside normal business hours.

The Product Assurance Supervisor is expected to:

• Facilitate the engineering on-call rotation.
• Provide technical leadership during significant operational events occurring during evenings, overnight hours, weekends, or holidays.
• Coordinate engineering response to customer-impacting incidents and critical product issues.
• Make timely technical decisions under operational conditions while balancing customer impact, engineering risk, and product integrity.
• Coordinate multidisciplinary engineering investigations during operational events.
• Lead post-incident engineering reviews and ensure corrective and preventive actions are implemented and verified.

Because our products support mission-critical operations, the Product Assurance Supervisor is expected to facilitate the engineering on-call rotation and provide leadership during significant operational events. While most work occurs during normal business hours, this role includes occasional evening, overnight hours, weekend, and holiday responsibilities when engineering expertise is required.

Desired Characteristics

The ideal candidate:

• Thinks like a systems engineer and approaches problems from a product perspective rather than a component perspective.
• Takes ownership of product quality and reliability from concept through operational deployment.
• Enjoys solving complex multidisciplinary engineering problems.
• Balances engineering rigor with practical execution.
• Builds scalable engineering processes through automation, metrics, and continuous improvement.
• Makes sound technical decisions under pressure.
• Communicates effectively with engineers, leadership, manufacturing, program teams, and customer-facing organizations.
• Uses operational experience and engineering data to continuously improve products and engineering practices.
• Leads with objectivity, technical credibility, and a commitment to engineering excellence.

Success Measures

Success in this role will be measured by:

• High confidence in product releases.
• Improved product reliability and operational availability.
• Reduced escaped defects and customer-