Validation Engineer

Job Description :

Our client is an automotive R&D and manufacturing site in Belgium, specialised in dual-clutch hybrid and conventional transmissions. Development and validation are done in-house, on a test centre with around 30 benches of its own and access to 50 to 60 in total including external capacity, with roughly 10 transmission projects running in parallel.
You join their validation team as an ENGIBEX consultant. The team is small, around 9 engineers, and each one owns a technical domain across all projects.

Your role

You take ownership of the validation of one mechanical domain of the transmission: gears and torque transfer, clutch, shifting and sealing systems, housings and structures, actuators, park lock, sensors and hydraulics, or the hybrid scope. The exact domain is decided together with the client, based on where your experience is strongest.
Within that domain, you are the person who decides what has to be proven, how it will be proven, and who signs it off.

What you will do

- Define the validation approach for your domain, including virtual validation.
- Translate product requirements into a validation plan and into detailed, executable test requests.
- Decide which bench and which test setup are needed, and get the resources secured.
- Follow the execution closely with the test engineers and test rig engineers, who run the tests you specified.
- Analyse the data, report the results, and decide whether the design passes or has to evolve.
- Sign off the validation results of your domain at SOP and at the other project milestones.
- Convert long-term planning into weekly planning and clear the roadblocks that threaten it.
- Support the wider organisation with work instructions on specific technical cases in your domain.

How the team works

- The organisation follows a V-cycle. The mechanical design teams own the left side, validation owns the right side. You are paired directly with a design cluster and follow the same cadence as its designers: what they design, you validate, and the design evolves on the back of your results.
- A validation architect sets the guidelines per project and consolidates planning. Validation engineers work across projects, specialised by domain, in a matrix structure.
- Test engineers execute the test requests you write. Test rig engineers own the bench expertise. The teams sit a few metres apart and work together throughout a campaign.
- Test execution also takes place at partner sites in Germany, France and Italy.

Profile / Requirements :

Required

- A Master's degree in electromechanical or mechanical engineering, or equivalent by experience. This is a mechanical role: a purely electrical, electronics, embedded or software background is not what the team is looking for.
- Several years of professional experience in the automotive industry. This position is not open to juniors or recent graduates: you are expected to know, for your domain, which tests validate a component and why.
- Fluent English, spoken and written. English is the working language of the team.
- You are based within commuting distance of the site, or ready to relocate to Belgium. The role is hands-on and bench-driven, so presence on site matters.

Two ways in

You fit this role if you recognise yourself in one of these two profiles:
1. You already work in validation in the automotive industry, on mechanical hardware. Transmissions ideally, but any mechanical automotive system counts. Validation methods are broadly the same from one manufacturer to the next, so the way you work will transfer. What matters is that your experience covers durability, reliability and limit testing, not only checking conformity to a requirement.
2. You are a mechanical design engineer in automotive with solid transmission or gear design expertise, and you want to move into validation. No validation experience is required on this route: your understanding of the product is what counts, and moving from design to validation is a natural step here.

Nice to have

- Hands-on experience with dual-clutch transmissions: gear pairs, synchronizers, clutch operation, planetary gear sets, differentials, hydraulics.
- Experience with hybrid powertrains, mild and plug-in.
- Structured problem solving: 8D, DFMEA, DVP, DOE.
- Test data analysis and scripting, Matlab or Python, and the ability to make a test campaign shorter or sharper.
- Familiarity with VECTOR CANape and CANalyser, INCA, AVL tools.
- Experience technically leading a team, or representing validation towards other disciplines.

The mindset that works here

The client put it plainly: they want an engineer, not someone who only executes. The people who succeed in this team ask sharp questions, take full ownership of their campaigns, communicate clearly and transparently with the design side, and reason from facts. If you like being the person accountable for whether a product is good enough to go to the customer, you will be in the right place.

Practical

- Working language: English.
- On site most of the week, with one day of home office as standard.
- Occasional travel to partner test sites in Germany, France and Italy.

About us :

We are a Belgian engineering consulting firm that assists SMEs and large industrial organizations in bringing their innovation and R&D initiatives to life.