{"id":3305936,"url":"https://alion.io/job/alcon-operational-excellence-instrumentation-rd-lead","title":"Operational Excellence, Instrumentation R&D Lead","company":{"id":5809,"name":"Alcon","domain":"alcon.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/alcon","size_band":"1001-5000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Workday","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":89,"open_postings":54,"ghost_share":0.056,"stale_share":0.278,"repost_share":0.056,"time_to_fill_p50_days":29,"computed_at":"2026-11-04T06:34:25Z"}},"role":"Industrial Engineering","role_family":"Industrial Engineering","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Lake Forest, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":254150,"max":328900,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":328900},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":10,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-26T00:00:00Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-26","last_verified_at":"2026-11-04T22:06:17Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":10,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":10},"description":"At Alcon, we're passionate about enhancing sight and helping people see brilliantly. With more than 25,000 associates, we innovate fearlessly, champion progress, and act swiftly to impact global eye health. We foster an inclusive culture, recognizing your contributions and offering opportunities to grow your career like never before. Together, we make a difference in the lives of our patients and customers. Are you ready to join us?\nThe Operational Excellence Leader strengthens organizational health and improves how a global Instrumentation R&D organization operates across three connected dimensions: processes and ways of working, product development performance, and culture. The role creates transparency, enables data driven decisions, simplifies high value processes, builds organizational capability, and leads improvements that increase speed, quality, predictability, and employee effectiveness.\nThis role is on-site in our Lake Forest, CA location and a typical day would include:\nOrganizational Health, Ways of Working, and Culture\nEstablish an organizational-health framework that provides insight into operating effectiveness, role and decision clarity, collaboration, change readiness, leadership follow-through, and employee enablement.\nCombine performance data, employee listening, stakeholder feedback, and operating observations to identify systemic barriers affecting execution and organizational effectiveness.\nPartner with leaders to translate organizational health insights into prioritized interventions with clear ownership, milestones, adoption measures, and expected outcomes.\nStrengthen ways of working through clear decision rights, effective governance, disciplined escalation, simplified interfaces, and visible accountability.\nBuild a culture in which teams surface problems early, resolve root causes using evidence, share learning, and sustain improvements without reliance on heroic effort.\nProcess Excellence and Product Development Acceleratio n\nEstablish and maintain a product development excellence framework covering principles, standard practices, decision criteria, measures, and governance across the development lifecycle.\nMap end-to-end workflows and identify bottlenecks, rework, delays, avoidable handoffs, duplicative activity, and other sources of friction.\nLead Lean and structured problem-solving initiatives that improve flow, shorten feedback loops, simplify work, and increase reuse without compromising quality, safety, or regulatory requirements.\nIdentify and prioritize Operational Excellence initiatives based on strategic value, product development impact, feasibility, organizational readiness, and measurable benefit.\nEvaluate automation, analytics, digital tools, modeling, simulation, artificial intelligence, and other technologies that can accelerate learning, increase capacity, improve quality, and strengthen decisions.\nPilot improvements, validate results, capture lessons learned, and scale successful practices across the global organization.\nProduct Development Performance\nCreate an integrated view of development performance, including flow, decision latency, milestone predictability, quality, risk retirement, reuse, and launch readiness.\nIdentify recurring issues across products and platforms, distinguish local execution challenges from systemic constraints, and lead cross-organizational solutions where shared intervention creates value.\nPartner with product, technical, quality, operations, and launch-readiness leaders to improve development outcomes while preserving their respective accountabilities.\nEnsure improvement priorities are tied to measurable effects on product outcomes, organizational capacity, employee experience, strategic capability, and sustainable value.\nGlobal Best Practices and Capability Building\nIdentify, validate, document, and scale effective practices across engineering disciplines, functions, sites, product teams, and relevant external benchmarks.\nTranslate proven improvements into practical standards, playbooks, templates, toolkits, training, and adoption mechanisms, allowing justified variation based on product, technology, risk, and regulatory needs.\nCoach leaders and teams in Lean, structured problem solving, change leadership, and continuous-improvement methods.\nBuild internal capability so leaders and teams can identify, implement, and sustain improvements as part of everyday work.\nPerformance Management and Value Realization.\nEstablish a balanced performance-management system covering organizational health, process effectiveness, product development performance, adoption, capabilities, and realized value.\nDevelop dashboards and operating reviews that support fact-based decisions, visible accountability, timely corrective action, and organizational learning.\nDefine business cases and success measures for improvement initiatives and track delivery from diagnostic through implementation and sustainment.\nConduct post-implementation reviews to verify outcomes, confirm adoption, identify unintended consequences, and capture additional improvement opportunities.\nWhat You’ll Bring To Alcon:\nBachelor’s Degree or Equivalent years of directly related experience (or high school +18 yrs; Assoc.+14 yrs; M.S.+7 yrs; PhD+6 yrs)\nThe ability to fluently read, write, understand and communicate in English\n10 Years of Relevant Experience\nPreferred Qualifications:\nBachelor’s degree in engineering, science, industrial engineering, operations management, business, or a related discipline required. Advanced degree preferred.\nR&D environment Demonstrated success improving complex product development or engineering organizations. Experience in medical devices, healthcare technology, life sciences, or another regulated industry is strongly preferred.\nTransformation leadership Proven record of leading cross-functional change from diagnosis through implementation, adoption, value realization, and sustainment in a global matrix organization.\nMethods Strong knowledge of Lean, Six Sigma, structured problem solving, process design, change management, KPI systems, organizational-health measurement, and benefits realization.\nDigital and analytics Experience using data visualization, analytics, automation, AI, or other digital technologies to improve decisions, productivity, quality, or organizational effectiveness.\nCertification Lean Six Sigma certification or equivalent practical expertise preferred. Change-management or project-management certification is beneficial.\nundefined\nHow You Can Thrive at Alcon\nSee your career like never before with focused growth and development opportunitiesJoin Alcon’s mission to provide outstanding, innovative products and solutions to improve sight, improve lives, and grow your career!\nAlcon provides a robust benefits package including health, life, retirement, flexible time off and much more.\nTravel - up to 20%\nSponsorship - No \nRelocation - No \nAlcon Careers\nSee your impact at alcon.com/careers \nATTENTION: Current Alcon Employee/Contingent Worker\nIf you are currently an active employee/contingent worker at Alcon, please click the appropriate link below to apply on the Internal Career site.\nFind Jobs for Employees\nFind Jobs for Contingent Worker\nCompensation and Benefits\nAlcon’s Total Rewards programs are designed to align incentives with business objectives, support our values, and deliver long-term value. Our compensation approach includes a combination of fixed and variable pay, with short-term and long-term incentive opportunities for eligible roles. Our benefits offerings are designed to support associates and their families across key life events, including programs that promote health and well-being, provide financial security, and support retirement planning.\nThe salary range posted represents the anticipated hiring range for this role. Actual compensation may vary based on factors such as experience, skills, location, and internal equity, and may fall outside the posted range.\nPay Range\n$254,150.00 - $328,900.00Pay Frequency\nAnnualAlcon is an Equal Opportunity Employer and participates in E-Verify. Alcon takes pride in maintaining a diverse environment and our policies are not to discriminate in recruitment, hiring, training, promotion or other employment practices for reasons of race, color, religion, gender, national origin, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital or veteran status, disability, or any other legally protected status. Alcon is also committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodation to individuals with disabilities. If, because of a medical condition or disability, you need a reasonable accommodation for any part of the application process, or in order to perform the essential functions of a position, please send an email to  and let us know the nature of your request and your contact information.","description_format":"text","description_chars":8896,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":10,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[{"language":"English","level":"Upper-Intermediate (B2)","optional":false}]},"benefits":["Equity","Flexible time off","Retirement plans"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":true,"industries":["Surgical Instruments & Devices","Eyewear"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-27T01:23:19Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":90,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.903,"p_room":1,"age_days":9,"expected_fill_days":29,"reasons":["conf:1","velocity","win:early","comp:brand"],"computed_at":"2026-11-04T06:34:25Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":328900,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/alcon-operational-excellence-instrumentation-rd-lead","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/alcon-operational-excellence-instrumentation-rd-lead.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-05T04:07:18Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":5311,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-06T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":5809},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=5809"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Falcon-operational-excellence-instrumentation-rd-lead"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Falcon-operational-excellence-instrumentation-rd-lead"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Falcon-operational-excellence-instrumentation-rd-lead"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/alcon-operational-excellence-instrumentation-rd-lead\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Falcon-operational-excellence-instrumentation-rd-lead"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":3305936}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"alcon.com","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":3305936},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. 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