About this role
DescriptionPosition Overview
We are looking for an experienced CAE Project Manager with strong technical expertise and proven experience in project execution, customer management, resource planning, and engineering team cross function .
The candidate will be responsible for managing end-to-end CAE projects, leading teams, planning and allocating resources, ensuring quality and timely delivery, managing customer expectations, and driving continuous improvement.
The ideal candidate should have a strong understanding of automotive CAE methodologies and be capable of bridging technical engineering, project management, people management, and business requirements.
Key Responsibilities
1. CAE Technical Leadership
- Lead end-to-end CAE projects across automotive product development programs.
- Provide technical direction and guidance to CAE engineers and analysts.
- Ensure adherence to customer-specific CAE Resources, methodologies, and quality requirements.
- Support correlation, validation, benchmarking, optimization, and design improvement activities.
- Provide technical inputs for design decisions and engineering trade-offs.
2. Project Management
- Own project scope, schedule, milestones, deliverables, quality, and execution plans.
- Prepare project plans,resource plans, schedules, and delivery roadmaps.
- Monitor project progress against agreed QCD – Profile Quality, Cost & Delivery objectives.
- Track project risks, issues, dependencies, assumptions, and mitigation actions.
- Conduct periodic project reviews and management reviews.
- Ensure timely escalation and resolution of critical project issues.
3. Resource & Team Management
- Plan and manage CAE manpower requirements based on project scope and workload.
- Allocate resources across projects based on competency, availability, and project priorities.
- Manage team utilization, productivity, workload balancing, and capacity planning.
- Identify skill gaps and create competency development and training plans.
- Mentor Leads, Senior Modelers, and CAE Analysts.
- Participate in recruitment, technical evaluation, onboarding, and deployment of CAE engineers.
- Build a high-performance engineering team and ensure employee engagement and retention.
4. Customer & Stakeholder Management
- Act as the primary technical/project interface with customers.
- Understand customer requirements and translate them into executable CAE plans.
- Conduct regular customer reviews and present project status, technical findings, risks, and action plans.
- Build strong relationships with OEMs, Tier-1 suppliers, engineering teams, and global stakeholders.
- Manage customer escalations and drive closure of technical and delivery issues.
- Identify opportunities for additional engineering scope and business growth.
5. Commercial & Operational Management
- Support project estimation, effort calculation, resource budgeting, and quotation preparation.
- Track project revenue, cost, resource utilization, and profitability where applicable.
- Support preparation of technical proposals, SOWs, BOQs, and project execution plans.
- Identify opportunities for productivity improvement and cost optimization.
- Support ramp-up and ramp-down planning based on project requirements.
6. Process Improvement
- Ensure compliance with defined engineering and project management processes.
- Establish project KPIs and dashboards for delivery, quality, productivity, and utilization.
- Drive lessons learned and continuous improvement initiatives.
- Standardize CAE processes, templates, methodologies, and best practices.
- Identify opportunities for automation and digitalization of CAE workflows.
Preferred Technical Domain Experience
Candidates with expertise in one or more of the following CAE domains will be preferred:
- Crash & Safety
- NVH
- Durability & Fatigue
- Structural Analysis
- CFD
- Thermal Analysis
- Vehicle Dynamics
- Multibody Dynamics
- Acoustics
- Optimization
- Battery / EV CAE
- Aerodynamics
Exposure to multiple CAE domains will be an added advantage.
CAE Tools
Working knowledge of relevant CAE tools such as:
- ANSA / META
- LS-DYNA / PAM-CRASH
- Abaqus
- Nastran
- HyperMesh / HyperView
- ANSYS
- Adams
- Star-CCM+ / Fluent
- MATLAB / Simulink
Tool requirements may vary depending on the project domain.
Required Skills
- Strong automotive CAE fundamentals
- Strong technical problem-solving capability
- Project planning and execution
- Resource and capacity planning
- Customer and stakeholder management
- Team leadership and people management
- Risk and issue management
- Estimation and effort calculation
- Excellent communication and presentation skills
- Strong analytical and decision-making skills
- Ability to manage multiple priorities and projects
- Strong understanding of engineering development processes
Qualifications & Experience
- B.E./B.Tech/M.E./M.Tech in Mechanical, Automobile, Aerospace, or related engineering discipline.
- 7–12 years of experience in Automotive CAE.
- Minimum 3–5 years in a Project Lead / Project Manager / CAE Manager / Technical Lead role.
- Experience working with automotive OEMs, Tier-1 suppliers, or engineering service organizations.
- Experience managing medium to large CAE teams is preferred.
- PMP / PRINCE2 / equivalent project management certification is an advantage.
Key Performance Indicators – KPIs
- On-time project delivery
- Project quality and customer satisfaction
- Resource utilization
- Resource productivity
- Project profitability / cost adherence
- Technical issue closure
- Customer escalations
- Team competency development
- Attrition and resource retention
- Process improvement / automation
- Business expansion and additional scope
Ideal Candidate Profile
The ideal candidate should be a “Technical Project Leader” who can effectively balance:
Technical Excellence + Project Delivery + Resource Management + Customer Management + Business Orientation
The candidate should be comfortable moving between a technical CAE review with engineers, a project review with the customer, and a resource/business review with management.