Project Engineer

We are looking for an enthusiastic Project Engineer to join Villari. You will work with the wireless sensor systems we have developed to monitor steel structures (more about us later), and your work has two sides. Externally, you take care of the application and installation of our hardware at customer sites, from the first drawings to a fully commissioned monitoring system. Internally, you help us organise the scale-up of our sensor production. You improve the quality checks on our sensors, and you support the logistics and preparation of projects so that these processes are set up properly.

This role requires a balance of technical expertise, practical insight and strong communication skills. For customer projects, you travel abroad regularly, on average about twice a month: to ports, manufacturing plants, and major infrastructure projects across the globe. One week you might be working in a port in Spain, the next on a monumental bridge in Canada. These are places most people never get to see. Between trips you work from Delft on the internal projects. That way, you get to know our hardware from both sides: how it is designed, manufactured and tested, and how it holds up in practice.

Fluent Dutch and English, spoken and written, are required for this role.

What will you do?

Your work consists of two core tasks: customer projects and internal production projects. How your time is divided between them varies from period to period. You are part of our team of project engineers and work closely with colleagues from business development and data analysis.

Customer projects: monitoring from start to finish

This is the core of your work as a Project Engineer. You guide monitoring projects from the customer’s first question to a system that measures reliably, and you are the point of contact throughout.

• You help the customer set up a monitoring project: which structure/asset, which critical locations, and what the monitoring needs to deliver.
• Together with customers, partner companies, and colleagues, you review the technical drawings and create a sensor layout that is technically feasible and fits what the customer wants to know.
• You plan the project and arrange what it needs: hardware, logistics, people, and clear arrangements with the customer on how the work will be carried out.
• You coordinate the installation. Sometimes you carry it out on-site yourself; sometimes you guide the customer remotely. Where needed, you train the customer’s team to work with the system.
• After installation, you check that the system does what was agreed. Our monitoring projects often run for several years. For that whole period you are the customer’s main point of contact for our measurement results: together with our data analysts, you explain what they show and what the customer can do with them.

Internal projects: quality, production and processes

What you learn at customer sites, you bring back in-house. There you work on the hardware itself and on the way we process it.

• You monitor and improve the quality control of our hardware (probes, transmitters and gateways); a sensor only leaves the building once it has been tested.
• You help scale up our internal production. You find the bottlenecks, document working methods and make sure we can process more sensors without compromising quality.
• You help with the logistics and preparation of projects (stock, shipping to the project site) and come up with ways to organise this better.

What we are looking for

We are looking for someone who feels at home at the intersection of customers, technology and production. This is what we look at most:

Strong communicator in Dutch and English: You speak and write both languages fluently and can explain technology clearly, to colleagues in Delft and to customers elsewhere.

Willing to travel: You enjoy travelling abroad, on average about twice a month.

Hands-on mentality: You organise and coordinate, but you also roll up your sleeves, both on-site at customer locations and in-house when testing and processing our hardware. You work independently, take ownership and like to get the job done.

Big-picture thinker: You keep technology, quality, customer and logistics in mind at the same time and see how a choice in production affects an installation, and vice versa. You switch easily between customer projects and internal projects and prioritise accordingly.

Problem solver: When an installation doesn’t go as planned or a production step could be better, you stay calm and look for the cause.

Eager to learn: You want to know how things work and why. You pick up new techniques and processes quickly and learn from every project.

Operational mindset: A process that simply runs well makes you happy, and you notice when it doesn’t. You work in a structured way and like to document and improve how things are done.

Customer-oriented: You enjoy direct contact with customers and build long-term relationships with them. You deliver on your commitments.

What will you bring?

• A Bachelor’s and/or Master’s degree in a technical field, preferably an applied one such as mechanical or civil engineering
• Ideally 1 to 2 years of relevant work experience
• Comfortable working at heights and in confined spaces
• Experience with quality control, testing or production is a plus
• A valid driving licence (category B)

About us

At Villari, we are dedicated to extending the lifetime of steel structures through our certified crack detection technology. Our permanently installed wireless sensors detect even the smallest fatigue cracks in critical locations by analysing variations in the magnetic field over time. Compared to traditional methods, we offer continuous and accurate inspection, hassle-free installation, competitive pricing, and certified technology. We work in critical environments: (rail)road bridges, ports, heavy industry, wind and offshore. Our sensors now monitor more than 150 critical structures, such as bridges, ships and cranes, in more than 25 countries. Our patented technology is trusted by clients such as ArcelorMittal, MISTRAS and DP World. We do this with a team of 15 FTE, based in Delft.

Villari’s core values

Integrity: We are honest about what we know and what we don’t know for certain. We treat our data with the greatest care and understand that it is of utmost importance in this critical industrial environment in which we operate. There is always room to address doubts and uncertainties, so that nothing is swept under the rug.

Expertise: Our company delivers a seriously high-tech service: we’re not building a new app to order pizza. The combination of fatigue crack growth, ferromagnetic flux leakage, and seamless wireless communication is our unique domain in which we work with a proud team of highly skilled and intellectual people. Customers rely on us because we know what we’re doing.

Accountability: We take responsibility for our actions. There’s no “not my problem” or “I don’t care” attitude at Villari. Learning from each other and carrying both a collective and an individual sense of ownership is extremely important in order to be an effective and well-balanced team.

Exploration: Villari was founded on the idea that we were bold enough to take complex physics and turn it into a meaningful product for our customers. As a result, we’ve pushed quite a few boundaries along the way and we’re not afraid to turn left where others go right. At every level, people are encouraged to try out new things and to test “wild ideas”. We understand and accept that new ideas sometimes turn out to be unsuccessful, as this is an integral part of exploring.

Approachability: As a company, and as individuals, we want to always be open for discussion, feedback, doubts, or just a casual chat about a topic unrelated to work. This applies to customers, suppliers, colleagues, and to superiors and people under your supervision. We help each other out and listen when others have something to say, regardless of seniority.

These values are at the core of our business and identity and it’s very important that all our employees identify with these values.

What do we offer?

• A salary between €3,000 and €3,300 gross per month, depending on your experience
• The opportunity to help shape an internationally operating scale-up
• A vibrant and professional company culture, based on ownership and responsibility
• 25 vacation days per year
• Daily lunch at our office
• Monthly company drinks and regular company outings