Automotive R&D Nordics Region Engineering Lead

End-to-End Business Ownership including:

Customer Engagement

Establish and maintain strong relationships with key stakeholders at customer organizations, acting as a trusted advisor.

RFQ and Proposal Support

Lead the engineering contribution to bids and proposals, ensuring realistic commitments and alignment with delivery capabilities.

Business Expansion

Identify and convert opportunities by addressing customer pain points with tailored engineering services and scalable delivery models.

Team Scaling and Governance

Drive ramp-up of local and global delivery teams. Define and implement governance and delivery frameworks to ensure success.

Service Delivery Management

Ensure high-quality, predictable service delivery with proactive risk management and continuous improvement mechanisms in place.

Line Management

Serve as the line manager for dedicated engineering teams, supporting their growth, motivation, and performance.

Regional P&L Ownership

Own and manage the region's engineering P&L, including accurate forecasting, revenue/cost tracking, and margin optimization. Collaborate with finance to maintain transparency and enable data-driven decisions.

Account Management

Proven experience managing strategic automotive engineering accounts, ideally involving OEMs and Tier-1 suppliers in the Nordics or broader European market. The candidate must be capable of building long-term trust-based relationships with senior customer stakeholders and ensuring consistent customer satisfaction. This includes managing expectations, resolving escalations, and translating evolving customer needs into actionable service enhancements or growth opportunities. A proactive, partnership-oriented mindset is essential.

Automotive Engineering Expertise

Strong technical foundation in automotive R&D, including familiarity with core domains such as embedded systems, ADAS, E/E architecture, infotainment, or vehicle software platforms. The candidate should understand engineering processes (e.g., ASPICE, ISO 26262), product development life cycles, and software/hardware integration. This expertise will be essential in ensuring technical credibility during customer interactions and in evaluating delivery feasibility and solution design.

Business Development

A commercially-minded leader who can identify growth opportunities within existing accounts and drive the acquisition of new business in collaboration with sales teams. This includes the ability to spot unmet needs or pain points, shape engineering offerings to fit, and lead or contribute significantly to RFIs, RFQs, and proposal responses. The role demands creativity in shaping service delivery models, combined with practical experience in negotiating scope, pricing, and delivery commitments with customers.

Line Management & Team Leadership

Direct experience leading and developing high-performing engineering teams, ideally across both local and global delivery models. The role includes line management responsibilities such as hiring, mentoring, performance reviews, career development, and maintaining team engagement. The candidate should be skilled at building team culture, providing regular feedback, and ensuring alignment between individual goals and business objectives.

Profit and Loss (P&L) Management

Solid track record of owning and managing P&L for engineering services or projects. The candidate will be expected to monitor and drive financial performance, including revenue, costs, and contribution margins. This requires regular forecasting, cost control, variance analysis, and close collaboration with finance teams to ensure data integrity. A strong understanding of how to balance financial discipline with customer satisfaction and team sustainability is crucial.

Quite a lot of Mandatory skills already.