On - 686 – Senior Specialist – Sports Engineer - Zürich

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Innovation

In short

Join On’s Innovation team as a Senior Specialist – Sports Engineering. You will drive cutting-edge advancements in sports performance by merging deep scientific understanding with advanced engineering principles. This role is centered on developing revolutionary bottom unit systems through CAE and emerging technologies. You’ll be pivotal in translating scientific insights into groundbreaking product innovations, pushing the boundaries of athletic performance.

Your mission

Your mission is to safeguard consistency, performance and steady innovation of the company’s proprietary bottom unit technologies across the performance product portfolio. By using your interdisciplinary engineering know-how you come up with new concepts to break performance boundaries and unleash new running experiences. In this role, you will move beyond physical prototyping by creating high-fidelity Finite Element Models that simulate the complex interaction between the human foot, the footwear, and the surface. Your mission is to use physics-based insights to optimize athletic performance, enhance running experience, and accelerate the product-to-market timeline.
As we interpret innovation as an horizontal approach you will support cross functionally and provide engineering expertise throughout the entire product lifecycle, from ideation to market launch.

Your story

– Master’s Degree in Mechanical engineering or Sports engineering
– 5+ years of footwear-specific experience and proven experience with footwear innovation projects.
– Proven experience running non-linear FEA (Explicit/Implicit) to analyze high-velocity impacts, energy return, and cushioning performance.
– Proven experience creating 3D digital twins of the human foot to simulate realistic soft-tissue deformation and pressure distribution.
– Deep understanding of polymer science and compound mechanics to develop digital material cards for hyperelastic foams, rubbers, and viscoelastic polymers using experimental test data.
– Mastery in Radioss/Abaqus/Hypermesh for finite element analysis.
– Proficiency in NX/Solidworks/Rhino for generative design.
– Ability to script in Python or Matlab to automate simulation workflows.
– Expertise in statistical analysis.
– Integrate machine learning in predictive modeling.
– Ability to identify design issues and offer solutions to improve functionality and manufacturability of products.
– Ability to work independently under a deadline on several projects simultaneously requiring both innovative ideas and engineering problem-solving.
– Excellent communication skills and comfort adapting communication style between engineers.
– Availability to travel up to 15% of the time.

Meet the team

The Innovation team is responsible for On’s future products, out-of-the-box thinking and athlete-informed technology that differentiates On’s products in the market. Within the Innovation team you will join the Sports Engineering team which is focused on footwear development with a scope covering long term innovation to inline products. You will have the opportunity to be part of an agile and interdisciplinary department of engineers and scientists. We foster a fast-paced environment with direct decision making and the freedom to design projects and processes.