Lead Tooling Engineer - Customer Operations & CI - Contractor Inside IR35 6-12m

We are looking to take on a Contractor for 6-12m to act as the onsite technical lead for tooling engineering services, providing day-to-day customer engagement, technical leadership, governance and continuous improvement whilst coordinating offshore and remote resources to ensure efficient delivery of tooling support activities.

The role will become the focal point between customer engineering teams, manufacturing, suppliers and the wider SES tooling team.

The role is 100% based onsite at Pitstone UK. No sponsorship will be offered for this role, now or in the future. The role could become temp to perm during 2027/28

Customer Leadership

• Act as primary onsite representative for tooling engineering activities.
• Build trusted relationships with customer engineering, manufacturing and operations teams.
• Lead technical discussions and prioritisation meetings.
• Provide regular status updates and performance reporting.
• Manage escalations and drive timely resolution.

Tooling Engineering

• Lead design, modification and maintenance of production tooling.
• Support NPI, industrialisation and production programmes.
• Review technical solutions and provide engineering approval where required.
• Drive standardisation and best practice across tooling activities.
• Support root-cause investigations and corrective actions.

Team Leadership

• Coordinate activities across onsite and offshore engineering teams.
• Mentor junior engineers and develop capability within the team.
• Define workload priorities and resource requirements.
• Promote engineering excellence and knowledge sharing.

Continuous Improvement

• Identify tooling cost reduction opportunities.
• Improve lead times and responsiveness.
• Implement standard work and governance processes.
• Develop reusable tooling solutions.
• Create and maintain lessons learned database.

Centre of Excellence Development

• Establish tooling design standards.
• Create engineering knowledge repositories.
• Develop customer roadmaps for tooling innovation.
• Introduce digital tooling and data-driven improvements.
• Support capability growth across multiple programmes.

Aerospace/Manufacturing Experience

• 5-8 years tooling engineering experience.
• Aerospace, automotive or complex manufacturing background.
• Experience supporting production environments.

Technical Skills

• Tooling design and development.
• Manufacturing engineering.
• CAD experience.
• Problem solving and root cause analysis.
• Configuration and change management.

Leadership

• Experience leading technical teams.
• Customer-facing experience.
• Stakeholder management.
• Ability to influence without direct authority.

Mobility

• Able to work full-time onsite.
• Eligible to work in the UK.
• Able to travel occasionally between customer and SES or supplier sites.

• Early finish on a Friday - 0800-1645 Mon-Thurs, 0800-1200 Friday
• Onsite canteen