Design engineer

Job Description

Lead Design Engineer | West Yorkshire

We are working with a growing marketing leading manufacturer within the Automotive sector (West Yorkshire) who are looking to appoint a Lead Design Engineer to take ownership of their day to day engineering function. This is a hands on leadership role, managing a small design team while driving a wide range of vehicle development and improvement activity.

This is a key position within the business, offering real influence over product design, engineering standards, and future vehicle programmes.

The Role

You will lead engineering activity across new product development, customer driven design, sales order engineering, and continuous improvement projects. You will be responsible for ensuring designs are robust, manufacturable, and aligned to both customer and business requirements.

Working closely with internal teams, suppliers, and customers, you will take ownership from initial specification through to production and vehicle fitment.

Key responsibilities include:

• Leading the day-to-day engineering function within the design team
• Managing customer sales requests and supporting quotation/specification work
• Creating and maintaining Bills of Materials (BOMs)
• Developing vehicle designs from concept through to manufacture
• Driving continuous improvement across existing product ranges
• Supporting new product development with the wider engineering team
• Ensuring designs meet manufacturing capability and regulatory requirements

Key Skills & Experience

Desirable industry experience:

• Automotive, vehicle design or similar

Strong experience should include:

• 3D CAD design (CATIA 3DExperience, Inventor or similar)
• Design of assemblies, sheet metal, structures, and detailed drawings
• Design for manufacture (DFM) principles
• BOM creation and engineering change processes
• Basic engineering calculations (weight distribution, stress analysis etc.)
• Understanding of vehicle systems (desirable) 
• Exposure to modern manufacturing methods (e.g. 3D printing) advantageous

Design Engineer Overview

You are a practical, hands on Design Engineer with a strong engineering mindset. You enjoy solving real-world manufacturing problems and are confident taking ownership of work from concept through to completion.

You will be comfortable working in a fast paced environment with multiple priorities, and you will enjoy working closely with different stakeholders across engineering, production, and customer teams.

You combine technical capability with clear communication, organisation, and a strong sense of accountability.

The Opportunity

This is a chance to join a business that is actively developing new technologies and improving its product range. You will have genuine input into engineering decisions, processes, and future product direction.

It’s a small, agile team environment where decisions are made quickly and your work will have visible impact across the business.