Purpose
A key player in Product Development & Sourcing, driving an agile, competitive, digitalized and clean supply base. Drive engineering and manufacturing innovations at both process and product level from concept validation to full deployment, creating overall industrial competitiveness.
Act as a consultant and technical expert guiding world-class supply of foams, rubber, plastics, adhesives, ink and paint, coloration, textiles and other polymer compounds and their manufacturing processes.
Key Responsibilities
- Understand the intellectual property landscape.
- Run individual project team-based collaborations for engineering and manufacturing innovation concepts and ingredients from validation to full deployment, using technical expertise throughout readiness levels, gate 1 and 2 meetings, and project scalability.
- Identify challenges and opportunities during innovation readiness stages and follow up on required workstreams, maintaining emphasis on performance, efficiency, cost and sustainability benefits.
- Receive seasonal compound requests from product creation teams and guide supply partners to experiment, formulate, test and transition compounds from development to production.
- Maintain the Material Lifecycle Management system for bottom material creation and management.
- Provide technical consultant feedback to Operations and Materials teams for new supplier onboarding, costing and quality.
- Ensure sourcing operations comply with adidas’ Responsible Sourcing & Purchasing Policy, adidas standards and legal requirements.
- Role model adidas values and behaviours and foster diversity, equity and inclusion.
Key Relationships
Global Sourcing teams, headquarters innovation and Product Development teams, and external Tier 1 and Tier 2 sourcing suppliers.
Knowledge, Skills and Abilities
- Advanced knowledge of polymer chemistry and chemical products, including formulations, processing, machinery and physical testing.
- Experience with solid specialties such as rubber, injected plastic components and textiles; liquid specialties such as ink, paint, textile coloration dyes, finishing chemicals, adhesives and primers; and gas specialties such as EVA, PU and physical foams.
- Strong analytical, problem-solving, project planning and delivery skills.
- Ability to explain highly technical concepts to non-technical audiences.
- Ability to challenge the status quo, with a basic understanding of costing principles.
- Good influencing, interpersonal, presentation and communication skills.
- Fluent written and spoken English.
- Strong Microsoft Office and AI skills.
Education and Experience
- University degree in Chemical Engineering, Polymer Science, Materials Science, Textile Engineering or a related engineering area.
- Minimum 3+ years of relevant experience.
Culture
adidas promotes a winning culture based on courage, ownership, innovation, teamplay, integrity and respect. The company emphasizes diversity, equity and inclusion as part of its culture and talent processes.