PCBA Quality Engineer

Title: PCBA Quality Engineer

Location: Samut Sakhon, Thailand

Core Responsibility:

• Own quality across the PCBA production process at the customer's contract manufacturer, including surface mount (SMT), wave soldering, and in-circuit test (ICT), for electronics that must operate reliably outdoors for years.
• Own quality across the SMT lines, from solder paste printing through placement and reflow, ensuring process control plans reflect what actually drives quality and are followed on every build.
• Own quality across the wave soldering process, including pallet design, flux and preheat control, and through-hole solder joint quality.
• Implement and monitor statistical process control (SPC) on critical process parameters, acting on drift before it becomes a yield or field problem.
• Hold PCBA workmanship to the IPC-A-610 standard at the appropriate class and ensure the contract manufacturer applies it consistently.
• Own the defect detection strategy across the PCBA process, including SPI, AOI, and X-ray, with coverage designed around real failure modes rather than default machine programs.
• Own quality of the ICT stage, including coverage, fixture health, and discipline around retest and failure disposition.
• Lead root cause analysis on PCBA failures from production, test, and the field, selecting the right analysis techniques and determining whether the cause is the process, the design, or the component.
• Collaborate with the customer's hardware design, test engineering, and failure analysis teams in Auckland, New Zealand, and with its Supplier Quality team when a failure traces back to a component.
• Own the quality side of any change affecting the PCBA, including new board revisions, component changes, line moves, and process changes, defining first article and validation requirements based on risk.

Key Deliverables:

• SMT and wave soldering processes that are demonstrably in control, with effective control plans and SPC on the parameters that matter.
• Consistent IPC-A-610 workmanship across all builds.
• SPI, AOI, X-ray, and ICT coverage that catches the defects that matter, with every escape closed by fixing both the process and the detection gap that missed it.
• Build-over-build improvement in PCBA first pass yield, driven by Pareto analysis of the largest defect contributors.
• Root cause identified and sustainable corrective actions implemented for production, test, and field failures.
• Improved correlation between production test results and field performance, closing gaps where boards pass test but fail in use.
• Design for manufacturability (DFM) feedback that lands in the next board revision.
• Risk-based first article and validation completed before any PCBA change is released to production.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Electrical/Electronics Engineering, Materials Engineering, Manufacturing Engineering, or a related field.
• 5+ years of PCBA quality engineering experience in high-volume electronics manufacturing, spanning SMT, wave soldering, and in-circuit test.
• Deep knowledge of SMT and wave soldering processes and their failure modes: paste, placement, reflow, flux and preheat, and the solder joint defects that follow when any of them drift.
• Working fluency with IPC-A-610 and related workmanship standards, with experience applying them in production.
• Hands-on failure analysis capability, including knowing which analysis techniques to use for a given failure mode and following the evidence to the true root cause.
• Strong statistical process control experience, including setting up SPC on critical parameters and acting on the data.
• Experience providing DFM feedback to design teams and seeing it implemented in the next revision.
• Comfortable working on the production floor each day; low ego and willing to raise difficult issues early.
• Fluent Thai and excellent verbal and written English communication skills.
• Experience working with a U.S. or global technology company is highly preferred.
• Willingness to travel as required.