Manager & Principal Engineer (f/m/d)

The Principal Engineer is a senior technical authority with deep system-level understanding, trusted to lead technically and foster innovation across the organization nd Engineering Group Manager leads and develops an Engineering team to deliver business milestones and business value predictably and with high quality. The EGM role is team and delivery centric. The EGM is accountable for delivery outcomes, team capacity & financial governance, risk & dependency management, and talent health, while ensuring strong alignment to product roadmaps and Aptiv processes.

Your role:

• Leading architectural definition and technical roadmap development for major programs and platforms
• Making complex design and trade-off decisions, addressing system integration challenges and cross-domain dependencies
• Acting as a senior mentor and technical advisor to engineering teams, reviewing critical designs and promoting design best practices
• Supporting root cause analysis and resolution of high-impact technical issues and escalations
• Influencing strategic technical decisions, such as technology stack choices, reuse strategies and investment in tools or infrastructure
• Ensuring technical consistency across distributed teams and maintaining architectural coherence across software and hardware interfaces
• Collaborating with Delivery teams to align technical direction with business and delivery goals
• Driving initiatives that improve code and design quality, delivery efficiency and long-term system scalability

Delivery Objectives & Predictability:

• Own business Milestones objectives and business value commitments
• Track predictability metrics (planned vs. actual Features / Business Value completion, BurnUp/Down), provide stakeholder communication, and ensure confidence in delivery outcomes.

Capacity, Work Allocation & Financial Governance:

• Allocate team capacity across features, manage defects & triage, technical debt, and improvement work.
• Manage team & SOW budget in alignment with the company forecasting's process and financial best practices, pass financial gates and integrate in the company tools to support delivery priorities.

Team Feature & Roadmap Governance:

• Govern team feature progress across business milestones
• Ensure roadmap alignment, track team multi-milestones, and enable incremental value delivery for platform initiatives

Risk & Emergent Work Management:

• Proactively manage systemic risks and unknowns.
• Maintain buffers for emergent work, define change control for milestones scope changes, and handle dependency-driven surprises.
• Responsible for ensuring that all risks and blockers are presented together with actionable mitigation paths, enabling stakeholders to assess options and decide on the appropriate course of action.
• Actively engage technical leaders inside and outside the team to safeguard delivery commitments and systematically reduce delivery risks.

Dependency & Coordination :

• Identify and manage Team milestones dependencies
• Maintain visibility, escalation paths, stakeholders reporting and handshake agreements to prevent delivery delays.

Continuous Improvement, Technical Depth, Quality & Compliance:

• Drive systemic improvements & lessons learnt from previous milestones and projects
• Ensure quality gates for feature completion, monitor defect trends, and maintain compliance with processes and standards.
• Apply strong technical judgment - leveraging personal expertise -to ensure engineering quality, de-risk delivery, and drive continuous improvement.

People & Talent:

• Retain essential responsibilities for team health including: hiring input, onboarding, coaching for delivery performance, evaluating & managing people performance; rewarding & promoting team members according to their contributions, and escalation of retention risks impacting business commitments.
• Build technical capability to secure and improve delivery and execution efficiency, acting as a technical coach who fosters engineering best practices, capable to challenge technical decisions when necessary, and enables teams and technical leaders to grow their technical competencies.

Your background:

• PHD in Natural Science, Computer Science, Engineering Management or related technical field.
• 10+ years working experience in product or feature development on hardware, software, and/or services
• Experience in budged management (ex. via Planview or equivalent)
• Strong motivation to learn new technologies like AI based approached to L2+ urban systems or Quantum computing
• Proven ability drive full ownership of delivery for a specific product in high stack environments
• Proven ability to clearly communicate program information to stakeholders at various levels of the organization at demanding exposure (written and verbal)
• Track record in problem solving & negotiating skills
• Ability to speak, to read and to write English and German

Why join us?

• You can grow at Aptiv. Aptiv provides an inclusive work environment where all individuals can grow and develop, regardless of gender, ethnicity or beliefs

• You can have an impact. Safety is a core Aptiv value; we want a safer world for us and our children, one with: Zero fatalities, Zero injuries, Zero accidents

Aptiv Benefits:

• Our working style: flexible work environment

• Learning, professional growth and development in a world-recognized international environment.

• Access to internal & external training, coaching & certifications.

• Recognition for innovation and excellence.

• Opportunities to give back to the community

Apply today, and together let's change tomorrow!

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Privacy Notice - Active Candidates: https://www.aptiv.com/privacy-notice-active-candidates

Aptiv is an equal employment opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability status, protected veteran status or any other characteristic protected by law.

Privacy Notice - Active Candidates: https://www.aptiv.com/privacy-notice-active-candidates

Aptiv is an equal employment opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability status, protected veteran status or any other characteristic protected by law.

Client-provided location(s): Wuppertal, Germany

Job ID: Aptiv-J000691203

Employment Type: OTHER

Posted: 2025-12-19T20:19:46