Head of Quality

About VAT Group

At VAT, we change the world with vacuum solutions. As the world’s leading supplier of high-performance vacuum valves, we have been driving innovation for more than 60 years. With over 3,200 employees worldwide, we operate from our headquarters in Haag, Switzerland, with manufacturing sites in Switzerland, Malaysia and Romania, as well as sales and service hubs around the world. We are guided by our passions: integrity, teamwork, customer centricity, and innovation – always working together as #oneVAT.

Joining us means becoming part of a passionate, international team where your voice is heard, your ideas matter, and your career growth is supported.

The Head of Quality, VAT Manufacturing Malaysia provides strategic leadership for the site's end-to-end quality ecosystem, ensuring excellence in quality performance, customer satisfaction, compliance, and operational effectiveness across a manufacturing operation of over 1,500 employees and CHF 1B+ annual output. As a key member of the site leadership team, the role drives quality transformation, strengthens organizational capability, and fosters a culture of quality and accountability across the value chain. The incumbent serves as a trusted business partner to senior stakeholders, ensuring sustainable improvements in quality performance while maintaining strong customer confidence with global semiconductor customers. The role translates the Corporate Quality Strategy and VAT Quality roadmap into site-level execution, while contributing local insights and best practices to shape global quality priorities and continuous improvement initiatives.

MAIN ROLE AND ACTIVITIES

Strategic leadership and transformation

• Lead the Quality function for VAT Manufacturing Malaysia, driving alignment with global quality strategy and site priorities.
• Champion a culture of quality through transformation initiatives to improve KPI performance, strengthen employee engagement, and build a quality-first culture across the value chain.
• As the site Quality leader, embed quality-first mindset across the factory influencing cross-functional stakeholders and end to end value chain to achieve sustainable business results.

End-to-end quality ownership

Own the site Quality Management System (QMS) and Assurance approach across product, manufacturing and customer-facing quality processes in alignment with Corporate Quality Systems & Methods.

• Ensuring compliance with corporate standards, customer requirements, and regulatory expectations.
• Drive alignment across incoming, in-process, and outgoing quality to consistently meet customer expectations.
• Establish clear accountability, transparency and governance with the respective function owners to deliver sustainable quality improvements.

Customer quality and escalation

• Lead critical customer escalations, ensuring effective resolution and restoration of customer confidence.
• Translate Voice of Customer feedback into systemic corrective and preventive actions to improve customer experience.

Performance and KPI governance

• Drive improvement of key quality metrics, including customer complaints, QPPM, yield, COPQ (Cost of Poor Quality), audit performance, customer scorecards and quality system compliance.
• Lead structured problem-solving and root cause elimination using methodologies such as RCA, 8D, and continuous improvement practices.
• Reduce recurring quality issues through data-driven decision-making and preventive actions.

Quality systems, compliance and operational excellence

• Ensure effective implementation and maintenance of the QMS, including ISO and customer audit readiness.
• Promote operational excellence through standardization, structured problem solving (RCA and 8D), robust risk management system, and continuous process improvement.
• Ensure quality risks are proactively identified, mitigated, and managed across the value chain.

Supplier Quality

• Partner with Strategic Sourcing to enhance supplier capability, supplier quality performance, and supply chain reliability and resilience.
• Collaborate and drive strategic quality initiatives with supplier development on corrective action programs to improve overall product quality and business performance.

Leadership and organization

• Build, develop, and lead a high-performing Quality organization with strong technical capability to support business and customer needs.
• Transform and lead the organization to foster a culture of accountability, collaboration, continuous learning, and employee engagement.
• Coach and develop Quality leaders, fostering a culture of engagement, innovation, accountability, and continuous learning to support organizational growth.

Working model and travel

• Working model: onsite.
• Travel requirement: as required for customer needs and global alignment.

KEY EXPERIENCES - What experiences bring success to this position?

Minimum qualifications

• 15+ years of quality leadership experience.
• Semiconductor or precision manufacturing background.
• Proven transformation experience.
• Strong customer and stakeholder management experience.

Preferred qualifications

• Lean and Operational Excellence qualifications.
• Lead Auditor qualification.
• Experience with major semiconductor equipment OEMs.
• Digital quality systems experience.

COMPETENCIES- What competencies bring success to this position?

• Strategic leadership with the ability to connect local execution to global quality governance.
• Customer-centric mindset and capability to lead executive escalations.
• Strong transformation leadership, change management and stakeholder alignment skills.
• Systematic problem-solving capability using RCA, 8D and data-driven KPI governance.
• Ability to build, lead and develop high-performing quality teams.
• Operational excellence mindset with focus on prevention, process capability and sustainable improvement.
• Cross-functional collaboration skills across Operations, Product, Manufacturing, Customer Quality and Strategic Sourcing

Our commitment to inclusion, fairness and equal opportunities

We believe in meaningful careers, continuous learning, and equal opportunities for everyone to drive our innovation and success. We welcome applicants from all backgrounds and are dedicated to fostering an inclusive and respectful workplace. If you have concerns, our compliance channel is available at our website. All reports are handled with strict confidentiality and in accordance with our Code of Conduct.