WHAT DOES AN APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT ENGINEER DO ?
Reviewed under Editorial Standards by Lam Nguyen
The Application Development Engineer is responsible for software development and maintenance of manufacturing equipment, ensuring continuous improvement and user-friendly interfaces. Collaborates closely with Industrialization Engineers, providing technical expertise and support throughout the product development process. Acts as a key liaison for Momentive's Global Sales Team, delivering professional customer support and fostering relationships for innovation and excellence in product development.
A Review of Professional Skills and Functions for Application Development Engineer
1. Application Development Engineer Duties
- Market Analysis: Understand and translate market requirements to product requirements.
- Application Development and UX Design: Define and develop application flow; consider UX requirements.
- Solution Analysis: Work with algorithms, systems, software, and other teams to analyze alternative solutions and provide data for decision-making.
- MVP Definition: Define minimum viable product working with the program/project management team.
- Tool Analysis: Tool performance and limitation analysis.
- Customer Support and Demo: Support customer demos and critical field issues.
- Feature Adoption Analysis: Analyze and drive the adoption of developed features in the field.
- Customer Application Support: Support customers in utilizing the MPM product line in Plastics and Composites applications and demonstrate clearly the value of products to the customer.
- Market Mapping Support: Support Marketing in mapping the current product offerings against local market needs.
- Material Development: Develop new silicone materials (NPI) to fulfill the changing market needs, as well as support marketing in new product launches.
- Product Benchmarking: Support Marketing through benchmark analysis of product performance in specific applications.
- Customer Inquiry and Trial Support: Follow up on key customer application inquiries and conduct the in-house trial to help with customer formulation optimization.
- Market Promotion Support: Support marketing to initiate market promotion activities including technical seminars, tradeshows, and other daily work.
2. Application Development Engineer Details
- Software Development: Responsible for the software development for manufacturing equipment and test devices.
- Continuous Improvement: Ensure continuous improvement of software (e.g., new functionalities) and design maintenance-friendly solutions by using standardized building blocks and user-friendly interfaces.
- Support Industrialization: Support Industrialization Engineers within the product development area (DFM, DFA, DFT, FMEA).
- Concept Development: Responsible for the concept development and owning the specification development process.
- Technical Documentation: Ensure proper technical documentation (user manual, troubleshooting guidelines, and MSA reports).
- Commissioning Support: Support the commissioning of manufacturing equipment and are responsible for Maintenance Engineering Training.
- Sales Liaison: Point of contact for Momentive's Global Sales Team with a focus on the automotive market.
- Customer Support: Professional customer support for current and new products, marketing, test execution, and troubleshooting, including on-site customer support (throughout the EMEAI region).
- Problem Solving: Supporting customers and global R&D teams in problem-solving with expertise in application and product know-how.
- Customer Requirements Translation: Translating customer requirements and needs for existing and new products.
- R&D Formulation: Helping design new substances with R&D formulations and defining clear technical objectives.
- Test Procedures Introduction: Introduction of application-specific test procedures and guidelines for the new materials.
- Evaluation Methods Development: Development of new evaluation and description methods for laboratory and customer-specific application support.
- Customer Relationship Establishment: Establishment of customer relationships regarding processes, production, and development.
- Product Know-How Development: Development of sound product know-how for customer applications.
3. Application Development Engineer Responsibilities
- Software Design and Development: Designs and develops simple software solutions to the level of quality defined by the requirements in adherence with I/S standards, methodology, and internal controls.
- Solution Alternatives Identification: Identifies and provides solution alternatives for the defined functional and system requirements.
- Documentation: Provides appropriate documentation for design decisions, estimating assumptions, code modules, and performance metrics by organization standards.
- Testing Participation: Conducts and/or participates in testing (i.e., unit, system integration) and reviews appropriate organization standards.
- Code Review Preparation: Prepares and conducts code and unit test walkthroughs for deliverables.
- Peer Review Participation: Participates in peer code reviews for others and provides constructive feedback.
- Collaborative Development: Collaborates with other programmers and technologists to ensure the development and maintenance of quality software solutions.
- Systems Analysis Collaboration: Collaborates with others regarding the effectiveness of systems flow, data usage, and manual or automated processes to verify requirements.
- Standard Compliance Assurance: Ensures software development meets standards for programming, design, performance, and security.
- Team Contribution: Participates in team activities and takes on additional work tasks to help the team accomplish the desired outcome or goals.
- Quality and Deadline Communication: Recognizes and communicates quality, deadline, and deliverables issues within own work environment to team leads and/or management.
- Support Provision: Provides second-level support and off-hour on-call on a rotating basis.
- Functionality Enhancement: Repairs, modifies, and develops additional functionality.
- Change Management Support: Follows and supports change management practices and internal controls standards. Communicates changes and impacts to those affected.
- Knowledge Sharing: Share knowledge and information with others to resolve problems and build team knowledge.
- Service Desk Maintenance: Creates and maintains service desk diagnostics and job aids for the area of responsibility.
- Information Update: Updates and/or reviews with those affected.
4. Application Development Engineer Job Summary
- Project Leadership and Collaboration: Technical leading and cooperation with synthetic and compounding groups to develop new applications to meet market demand.
- Market Analysis and Ideation: Analysis of market technical trends and initiation/ideation of potential applications.
- Technical Consulting: Consulting for internal and external customers.
- Technical Research and Reporting: Fulfilling technical work requests, designing experiments, performing lab bench work for analysis, and writing up reports to meet the technical targets of customer projects.
- Customer Support and On-site Service: Visiting key customers and providing on-site technical support to satisfy technical needs.
- Skill Development and Training: Developing related application processing skills and knowledge, training customer technicians in the lab, and providing technical service/troubleshooting in the field.
- Application Capability Enhancement: Enhancing application capability to continuously meet the technical/application trend.
- Product Selection and Value Delivery: Technical consulting for internal and external customers to select the suitable product and deliver the value of the product.
- Collaboration with Marketing and NBD: Working closely with marketing and NBD team and customers on new application development projects.
- Test Protocol Development and Data Creation: Developing customized test protocol/simulation test protocol and creating application data.
- Technical Presentations and Industry Engagement: Giving technical presentations to customers and commercial partners, keeping close contact with the industry, and being updated with the latest technology.
- Quality Complaint Management: Working together with sales team, QA, and production team to handle customer quality complaints.
- Regional and Local Program Implementation: Working with regional application development teams to implement global/regional application programs, as well as developing relevant local programs locally.
- Lubrizol Community Communication: Keeping communication with the Lubrizol technical community, being updated on new product development, and new processing technology development.
- Customer Needs and Market Trends: Anticipating, determining, and understanding customer needs and expectations and market trends.
5. Application Development Engineer Accountabilities
- Technical Support and Applications: Provide technical and applications-based support to the sales and marketing teams.
- Product Testing and Training: Implement product performance tests, experiments troubleshooting for customers, and hands-on training for internal sales and product teams.
- Troubleshooting and Customer Support: Troubleshoot customer issues related to diagnostic products and provide solutions where available to support business objectives.
- Feedback Analysis and Opportunity Identification: Use customer feedback to identify new opportunities and unmet needs in relation to new product proposals, product modifications, and application development.
- Custom Solutions and Technical Partnerships: Develop and support custom opportunities and be a key point of contact with the customer on technical partnership opportunities.
- Team Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing: Great teammate with the ability to share knowledge and best practices, activities, and success stories across teams/regions.
- Specialty Knowledge in Coatings, Adhesives & Films: Maintain an expert level of understanding for coatings, adhesives, and films – chemistries, processing, application, and final properties.
- Film Properties Expertise: Experienced with evaluating and improving film properties through formulation and additives e.g., surface energy, mechanical properties, chemical resistance, and optics.
- Electronics Applications Expertise: Experienced with a variety of specialty uses (and challenges) in electronics, such as circuit boards, printed electronics, and other applications related to consumer devices.
- Value Chain Understanding: Understand the value chain and which parts drive decisions for a specific area of use. Connected to this, be able to speak to people at all levels in this value chain.
- Customer Requirements and Product Development: Get clear customer requirements (CTQ) and convert those, with the help of one of the Application Development Engineers, into product development material parameters that R&D can use.
Editorial Process
Lamwork content is developed through structured review of publicly available job postings and documented hiring trends.
Editorial operations are managed by Thanh Huyen, Managing Editor, with research direction and final oversight by Lam Nguyen, Founder & Editorial Lead. Content is periodically reviewed to reflect observable labor market changes.