Regional Manager, Customer Reliability
Harman · Suzhou
HARMAN’s engineers and designers are creative, purposeful and agile. As part of this team, you’ll combine your technical expertise with innovative ideas to help drive cutting-edge solutions in the car, enterprise and connected ecosystem. Every day, you will push the boundaries of creative design, and HARMAN is committed to providing you with the opportunities, innovative technologies and resources to build a successful career.
A Career at HARMAN
As a technology leader that is rapidly on the move, HARMAN is filled with people who are focused on making life better. Innovation, inclusivity and teamwork are a part of our DNA. When you add that to the challenges we take on and solve together, you’ll discover that at HARMAN you can grow, make a difference and be proud of the work you do everyday.
Introduction: A Career at HARMAN Automotive
We’re a global, multi-disciplinary team that’s putting the innovative power of technology to work and transforming tomorrow. At HARMAN Automotive, we give you the keys to fast-track your career.
- Engineer audio systems and integrated technology platforms that augment the driving experience
- Combine ingenuity, in-depth research, and a spirit of collaboration with design and engineering excellence
- Advance in-vehicle infotainment, safety, efficiency, and enjoyment
About the Role
The Manager, Regional Customer Reliability leads a regional team of Customer Reliability Managers
(CRM), who is the primary interface between HARMAN Product Reliability (HW validation and certification/homologation) and customer teams program teams, and responsible for customer validation activities, reliability performance, and customer engagement throughout the product lifecycle. In short words being the Project Managers within Product Reliability department.
The team plays a crucial role in ensuring that products meet customer needs before they are widely released, and when leading this team, you will work close together with Program Management, Hardware Engineering, Software Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Manufacturing, Systems Engineering, Quality, Certification/Homologation, Finance, and Customer teams.
This position is also responsible for leading regional customer escalations with support from the CRM task force and ensuring rapid containment, root cause investigation, corrective action implementation, and ensure transparent communication with customers and leadership.
Key Responsibilities
Regional Team Leadership & Program Management
- Lead, coach, and develop a regional team of Customer Reliability Managers, ensuring high performance, talent growth, and organizational capability development.
- Establish clear performance objectives and support individual development, succession planning, and long-term capability building within the regional CRM organization.
- Foster a culture of accountability, customer focus, collaboration, execution excellence, and continuous improvement.
- Ensure effective prioritization, resource allocation, and workload balancing across customer programs, product development activities, and customer escalations.
- Lead the regional CRM organization in serving as Product Reliability Program Managers, driving end-to-end execution of reliability, validation, and customer deliverables throughout the product lifecycle.
- Ensure disciplined program management practices through comprehensive project planning, detailed schedules, milestone management, action tracking, risk management, and regular progress reviews.
- Partner with Engineering, Product Reliability, Program Management, Manufacturing, Supplier Quality, and Sales organizations.
- Drive cross-functional alignment across engineering, validation, quality, manufacturing, program management, and customer teams to ensure successful execution of reliability and validation commitments.
- Establish governance mechanisms to monitor program health, identify execution risks, remove roadblocks, and ensure on-time delivery of key customer and business objectives.
- Ensure transparency through structured reporting, KPI management, and executive-level communication of program status, risks, mitigation plans, and critical decision points.
- Oversee regional RFQ and Change Request (CR) estimations for hardware validation activities, ensuring accurate assessment of customer requirements, scope, cost, effort, timing, resource needs, and execution feasibility.
Customer Reliability Management
- Lead regional customer reliability activities throughout product development
- Ensure successful execution of customer validation requirements and reliability commitments.
- Being part of the escalation path for customer reliability concerns within the region.
- Drive proactive identification and mitigation of program, validation, and identify risks.
- Support customer reviews and maintain strong customer relationships.
Escalation & Task Force Governance
- Provide leadership, direction, and oversight for regional customer escalation management and task force activities related to product reliability, validation execution, and customer satisfaction related to Product Reliability.
- Ensure effective regional execution of customer escalation processes through designated CRM and CRM task force owner.
- Drive a culture of accountability, urgency, and structured problem-solving across escalation and issue-resolution activities.
- Review and challenge investigation strategies, root cause analyses, containment actions, and corrective action plans to ensure successful and sustainable resolutions.
- Serve as the regional management escalation point for critical customer issues, supporting decision-making and prioritization of resources.
- Ensure significant customer risks, business impacts, and emerging trends are appropriately communicated and escalated to Global CRM leadership.
- Provide executive-level oversight, status reporting, and strategic guidance during critical customer situations and high-visibility escalations.
Operational Excellence
- Ensure compliance with global CRM standards, processes, and governance requirements.
- Drive continuous improvement initiatives focused on quality, efficiency, and customer satisfaction.
- Monitor key performance indicators and regional performance metrics.
- Support audit readiness activities and compliance with customer-specific and internal requirements.
- Share best practices and lessons learned across the global CRM organization.
Resource and Capacity Management
- Manage regional CRM resource planning and workload balancing.
- Support resource planning in demand planning and forecasting activities.
- Identify future resource and competency requirements.
- Ensure efficient utilization of regional CRM resources while maintaining customer commitments.
What You Need to Be Successful
- Deep knowledge of typical automotive design cycles, validation phases and deliverables
- Deep program management skillset – planning, matrix management, communication
- Knowledge with the development and management of environmental test laboratories
- BSEE, BSEET, BSCS, BS Physics or equivalent experience.
- More than 10 years in an engineering or engineering management role, 5 years minimum in a validation role with Environmental, EMC, Electrical qualification, or related experience.
Automotive industry background highly desirable.
- Excellent skills in project management and time management
- Creative problem-solving skills and ability to excel working within highly dynamic situations.
- Audit experience.
- Very good verbal and written communication skills
- Fluent in English (excellent written & verbal communications) is required.
- Strong presentation skills.
Bonus Points if You Have
- Demonstrated excellent experience functioning in a highly collaborative, demanding, and fast-paced environment.
- Extraordinary creative problem-solver
- Very Dedicated and high-level performer with the ability to advocate appropriately for product quality.
- Outstanding knowledge of Office productivity software
- Good team management skills are a desire, such as people retention and motivation, target setting, communication, coaching and etc.
- Familiar with Automotive international reliability standards. Familiar with TS16949, ISO17025 standard, internal/external certification auditor is a desire.
- Good knowledge of PPAP, DFMEA, MSA.
- Well trained in problem solving methodology.
- Sufficient knowledge of project workflow and experience of APQP is a desire.
- Experience of working with foreign people is a plus.
- Experience collaborating globally.
- Advanced test solutions knowledge for automotive industries.
What Makes You Eligible
- Be willing to travel up to 10%, domestic and international travel
What We Offer
- Access to employee discounts on world-class Harman and Samsung products (JBL, HARMAN Kardon, AKG, etc.)
- Extensive training opportunities through our own HARMAN University
- Competitive wellness benefits
- Tuition reimbursement
- “Be Brilliant” employee recognition and rewards program
- An inclusive and diverse work environment that fosters and encourages professional and personal development
HARMAN is proud to be an Equal Opportunity / Affirmative Action employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, religion, color, national origin, gender (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics.