Program Engineer
Designed Conveyor Systems · Franklin, TN · Remote option
About the Role:
As our Program Engineer, you’ll play a critical role in supporting the successful delivery of projects across a specific customer portfolio with diverse building and project types. You’ll act as a technical and program-level integrator—bridging Engineering Delivery, Program Management, Controls, Applications, and Solutions and Growth teams to ensure alignment from early opportunity through execution and go-live. This role is highly cross-functional and requires strong functional design expertise, commercial awareness, and the ability to proactively identify risks, align stakeholders, and drive clarity across project phases. You will provide engineering oversight across multiple concurrent precontract opportunities and active projects, helping ensure solutions are well-defined, executable, and aligned to DCS standards and customer expectations.
Sound like you? Read on.
In this role, you will:
Serve as a technical and program partner across projects and opportunities within a vertical ensuring alignment, visibility, and execution readiness across engineering and program teams. Your key accountabilities and responsibilities will include:
Key Accountabilities
- Customer and Employee Experience: Accountable for leading by example in delivering exceptional employee and customer experiences, and modeling DCS values and cultural behaviors.
- Program Alignment & Visibility: Accountable for maintaining visibility across all active and upcoming projects, ensuring alignment between engineering, program management, and customer expectations.
- Engineering Quality & Design Integrity: Accountable for ensuring functional designs are robust, aligned to best practices, and executable across engineering and controls.
- Pre-Execution Planning & Estimation Accuracy: Accountable for supporting accurate engineering estimates including schedules, resource skillset, and scope definitions during proposal and front-end phases.
- Risk Identification & Mitigation: Accountable for proactively identifying design, schedule, and vendor risks and ensuring they are communicated and addressed early.
- Cross-Functional Coordination: Accountable for enabling effective collaboration between Mechanical Engineering, Project Engineering, Controls, PMs, and external partners.
Key Responsibilities
- Maintain active participation in heartbeat meetings to track project updates, risks, and resourcing needs.
- Coordinate across PMs, Controls, and Engineering teams to align priorities for upcoming and active projects.
- Participate in coordination meetings and forecast reviews to ensure alignment on workload and resource planning.
- Own the program lessons-learned process, identifying recurring engineering, vendor, and execution risks and driving improvements that strengthen future project performance.
- Identify future resource constraints and communicate staffing, skill, and capacity risks to leadership.
- Evaluate and support increase of capability and capacity within engineering teams to support growth within customer profile projections.
- Regularly review program dashboards, trackers, and reporting tools that provide visibility into project status, engineering demand, risks, customer requirements, and execution readiness.
- Mentor engineers and project team members on customer standards, program expectations, and lessons learned.
- Share customer, program, and engineering knowledge across project teams to improve consistency and execution quality.
- Facilitate feedback and growth of program team including program manager, sales, and program engineers.
- Advise sales, applications, and program management on pursuit strategy, solution fit, execution risk, and customer priorities based on program experience and historical performance.
- Review risk and consult leadership on new expansions within customer portfolio.
- Attend and advise system design reviews across projects, providing guidance on functional design and execution best practices.
- Participate in internal and customer design reviews and firm engineering calls to ensure alignment on solution intent and standards.
- Support development of functional design breakouts for firm engineering phases.
- Provide input and pushback where needed to maintain design integrity and adherence to DCS standards.
- Develop expert-level understanding of customer specifications and requirements.
- Support creation of customer specifications when not provided.
- Increase engagement and visibility with assigned vertical customers to ensure alignment and confidence in solutions.
- Maintain visibility and communicate changes to customer standards, specifications, engineering practices, and program requirements to ensure consistent execution across all projects within the portfolio.
- Own engineering hour estimation for opportunities, including ME, PE, Product Design, and site-related costs.
- Support ROM pricing evaluations and provide validation of labor and material assumptions.
- Review proposals and contribute to functional scope definition and mechanical clarifications.
- Participate in precontract review meetings, including Go/No-Go (GNG), Vendor Bid Reviews (VBR), and Financial Reviews (FR), with focus on clarifying costs and mitigating risks while supporting the capture strategy from a technical perspective.
- Review and consult on project schedules to validate durations for FE, execution, procurement, and controls integration.
- Support go/no-go evaluations by assessing RFPs, sales inputs, and associated risks.
- Ensure readiness for execution by aligning scope, schedule, and engineering deliverables.
- Participate in design reviews and customer FE calls throughout the project lifecycle.
- Maintain a forward-looking view of engineering demand, testing support, travel requirements, and go-live activities across the program portfolio.
- Support testing plans, site activities, and go-live execution as needed.
- Provide on-site or remote support during critical execution phases.
- Serve as the Engineering point of escalation and support for all projects within the program portfolio.
- Evaluate proposed vendors and provide input on technical fit and execution risk of bidding and backlog projects.
- Support vendor training and knowledge sharing across the engineering team.
- Partner with Supplier Development to onboard and assess vendors and suppliers based on project needs and past performance.
We’re Excited About You Because:
- You have a Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering or related field.
- You have 5+ years in material handling system design and delivery engineering.
- You have strong engineering and design expertise and understand how systems translate from concept to execution.
- You are comfortable operating across multiple projects and priorities, balancing detail with big-picture program alignment.
- You excel in cross-functional communication and can influence without direct authority.
- You have strong commercial awareness, including estimating, proposal support, and cost evaluation.
- You are proactive in identifying risks and driving alignment before issues impact execution.
- You enjoy work that includes travel expectations between 30-40% of your typical year.
- You are highly organized and capable of tracking multiple workstreams, stakeholders, and deliverables simultaneously.
This job description is not exhaustive. Other duties may be assigned as needed, and responsibilities may evolve to support the business and employee experience.
About Us:
Conveyor may be in our name, but it’s only part of what we do. DCS was founded in 1982 and has grown to serve major clients in multiple industries by providing material handling, full-scale warehouse operations and conveyor design solutions that are custom crafted for their need. We don’t sell ready-made systems - we build relationships that empower us to craft custom solutions together. It’s the teamw