Defect Manager

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.

About the Role

Defect Management is a project management activity and part of project management for software development projects.  A team of defect managers provides expert knowledge to all major European OEM projects.  It aims to establish standardized problem resolution processes, reporting standards, and tailors project conventions.  It handles a large number of SW defects and sets up the necessary tooling.

Defect management establishes processes to cover areas Process Development, Ticket Handling, Ticket Tracking, Ticket Reporting, and Tooling.  The Defect Manager is the project process owner and applies the generic defect management process with necessary tailoring to development projects.  The role combines operational defect coordination with process ownership to actively drive project execution, release readiness, and product quality.  This activity directly supports the SW project lead and the customer Defect Manager of automotive SW development projects.

What You Will Do

• Own and drive the Defect Management process within one or more automotive software development projects throughout the complete product lifecycle.
• Act as project process owner for Defect Management by tailoring and applying the generic Harman Defect Management process to project-specific customer, organization, and release requirements. Ensure compliance with ASPICE, internal quality standards, and customer expectations.
• Support Maturity Gate reviews by working on necessary actions in time.  Collaborate with the Quality function.
• Define and maintain project-specific workflows to ensure high-quality ticket processing.  Define ticket handling conventions, tagging concepts, reporting structures, escalation paths, and ticket governance rules. Monitor ticket completeness and quality, ownership, and adherence to ticket processing standards.
• Coordinate ticket triage and responsibility clarification across functional and solution domains. Resolve ownership conflicts, support prioritization decisions, and reduce ticket ping-pong between teams and external suppliers
• Monitor and drive project performance through Defect Management KPIs including ticket aging, inflow/outflow, processing times, reopen rates, target curves, overdue investigations, and release readiness indicators. Analyze trends and initiate corrective actions together with project stakeholders.
• Create and maintain project dashboards, ticket statistics, management reports, and customer-facing defect reports using ELVIS (Harman Defect Management tool), MRT, Qlik, Excel/ODBC, and related reporting tooling.
• Plan and track ticket reduction activities toward release and SOP milestones by defining and monitoring ticket target curves, zero-defect objectives, and release quality criteria
• Lead and moderate Defect Control Boards, ticket review meetings, escalation meetings, and cross-functional defect synchronization activities with internal teams, customers, and suppliers.
• Maintain and continuously improve project-related ELVIS tool configurations including user rights, project structures, and synchronization setup with external systems.
• Coordinate cross-company defect exchanges and synchronization workflows between Harman and customer/supplier systems such as BMW Octane, Audi KPM, STARC, Jira, and platform projects. Monitor interface quality and support resolution of synchronization issues.
• Identify process gaps and continuous improvement opportunities in tooling, reporting, workflows, automation, and KPI management. Initiate and track process and tooling optimization activities together with Defect Management and tooling teams.
• Actively coordinate cross-functional stakeholders to drive timely defect analysis, prioritization, integration, and verification.  Collaborate with Software Project Leads, Functional Owners, Quality, Testing, customer Defect Management, and supplier organizations. Ensure sustainable process knowledge within the organization.
• Identify process gaps and continuous improvement opportunities in tooling, reporting, workflows, automation, and KPI management. Initiate and track process/tool optimization requests together with Defect Management and tooling teams

What You Need to Be Successful

• Strong affinity for data, numbers, and structured work (quality mindset, attention to detail)
• IT/tooling confidence: practical experience with Microsoft Excel, Outlook, and Copilot (or similar productivity tooling)
• Excellent communication skills in English
• Comfortable using AI-assisted tools to accelerate reporting and documentation with disciplined validation and responsible data handling
• Evidence of excellence through prior structured work.  Professional working experience for 3 years or more

Bonus Points if You Have

• Education in Engineering or Computer Science
• VBA and/or Python experience for automation

What Makes You Eligible

• Intercultural experiences and social skills
• Hybrid working model; on‑site preferred (Bucharest)

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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.