Senior Product Development Engineer

Senior Product Development Engineer

HydroJug · Ogden, UT — onsite · Full-time

About HydroJug

HydroJug is a hydration and lifestyle brand in Ogden, Utah, selling direct to consumers and through national retail. We launch new product at a pace most companies our size do not attempt.

About the Role

Until now our factories have engineered our products. That has worked, and those partnerships are staying — but it means the people who build our parts also tell us what is possible and what it should cost. We are bringing that capability in house, and you would be the first engineer to hold it.

This is not about replacing our factory partners or second-guessing them from a desk in Utah. It is about being a technical peer they respect — someone who can hold their own in a tool review, contribute ideas their engineers did not think of, and tell this cannot be done from we would rather not do it .

The mandate: make our product bulletproof, and make it cost less to build. Best-made product in our category, problems solved at the root instead of patched, and a cost position that lets us sell a better product for less than our competition without giving up margin.

Cost and quality are not competing goals here — they are the same decision. Cavitation, steel, gate location, wall section and resin set unit cost and defect rate at the same moment, and most of what a product costs is locked in during design. That moment is yours.

What You Will Do

• Own DFM, tolerances and materials from concept to production — and change the design before the tool is cut, not after.
• Own tooling: design review, steel and cavitation, trial planning, and the call when a first article comes back wrong.
• Give sourcing the engineering teardown behind every part — what it should cost and why — so negotiations run on technical fact, not a round number.
• Build our product test program from nothing — drop, leak, thermal, cycle life, cleanability — and specify the equipment to do it properly.
• Work with our packaging designer and factories to take cost, cube and damage out of packaging without losing the unboxing experience.
• Specify what our raw materials actually are, find better ways to make things, and root-cause the failures that trace to design or tooling.

What Success Looks Like

Month one: you have torn down our line and told us plainly where our real quality and cost exposure is — including which current products would fail a test we do not yet run.

Month three: test protocols drafted, equipment specified, a first factory visit behind you.

Month six: you carry an independent engineering position into our stage gates as a matter of course, with at least one cost reduction and one quality improvement traceable to you.

What You Bring

• Five to ten years engineering hard goods — durables, housewares, drinkware, outdoor gear or similar — taken all the way to mass production.
• Real tooling ownership: mold design review, steel and cavitation, trials, DFM changes made before steel was cut, and what you do when T1 comes back wrong.
• You can build the technical cost picture behind a part — resin, cycle time, cavitation, secondary ops, tooling amortisation — and have used it to support a negotiation.
• Test protocols you built and ran, and a product you changed because of the data.
• Direct experience working inside overseas factories, not just managing them from a distance.

Nice to have

• Injection molding process depth — gating, shrink, warp, sink, and the defects each causes.
• Multi-material assemblies: silicone, TPE, stainless vacuum insulation.
• Packaging engineering — carton and pack-out design, cube optimisation, drop performance.
• You have introduced a process or material new to your employer, not just new to a product.
• You have been the first in-house engineer somewhere that used to rely on its factories.

Details

• Location: Ogden, Utah. This role is onsite.
• Travel: Frequent international travel to our factories in Asia — roughly six to ten trips a year, some two weeks or longer. Central to the job, not an occasional extra.
• Physical: Regular handling of samples, tooling and fixtures up to 40 pounds, and time on factory floors.
• Growth: The founding seat of our in-house product engineering capability — an IC role today, with a path to build a team as it proves out.

Compensation

Compensation for this role is set against the market for the position and the experience you bring to it, and is discussed directly during the interview process.

HydroJug is an equal opportunity employer. We consider all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic.