Operational Excellence, Instrumentation R&D Lead

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?

The 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.

This role is on-site in our Lake Forest, CA location and a typical day would include:

• Establish an organizational-health framework that provides insight into operating effectiveness, role and decision clarity, collaboration, change readiness, leadership follow-through, and employee enablement.
• Combine performance data, employee listening, stakeholder feedback, and operating observations to identify systemic barriers affecting execution and organizational effectiveness.
• Partner with leaders to translate organizational health insights into prioritized interventions with clear ownership, milestones, adoption measures, and expected outcomes.
• Strengthen ways of working through clear decision rights, effective governance, disciplined escalation, simplified interfaces, and visible accountability.
• Build a culture in which teams surface problems early, resolve root causes using evidence, share learning, and sustain improvements without reliance on heroic effort.

• Identify, validate, document, and scale effective practices across engineering disciplines, functions, sites, product teams, and relevant external benchmarks.
• Translate proven improvements into practical standards, playbooks, templates, toolkits, training, and adoption mechanisms, allowing justified variation based on product, technology, risk, and regulatory needs.
• Coach leaders and teams in Lean, structured problem solving, change leadership, and continuous-improvement methods.
• Build internal capability so leaders and teams can identify, implement, and sustain improvements as part of everyday work.
• Performance Management and Value Realization.
• Establish a balanced performance-management system covering organizational health, process effectiveness, product development performance, adoption, capabilities, and realized value.
• Develop dashboards and operating reviews that support fact-based decisions, visible accountability, timely corrective action, and organizational learning.
• Define business cases and success measures for improvement initiatives and track delivery from diagnostic through implementation and sustainment.
• Conduct post-implementation reviews to verify outcomes, confirm adoption, identify unintended consequences, and capture additional improvement opportunities.

• Bachelor’s degree in engineering, science, industrial engineering, operations management, business, or a related discipline required. Advanced degree preferred.
• R&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.
• Transformation leadership Proven record of leading cross-functional change from diagnosis through implementation, adoption, value realization, and sustainment in a global matrix organization.
• Methods Strong knowledge of Lean, Six Sigma, structured problem solving, process design, change management, KPI systems, organizational-health measurement, and benefits realization.
• Digital and analytics Experience using data visualization, analytics, automation, AI, or other digital technologies to improve decisions, productivity, quality, or organizational effectiveness.
• Certification Lean Six Sigma certification or equivalent practical expertise preferred. Change-management or project-management certification is beneficial.
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• Bachelor’s Degree or Equivalent years of directly related experience (or high school +18 yrs; Assoc.+14 yrs; M.S.+7 yrs; PhD+6 yrs)
• The ability to fluently read, write, understand and communicate in English
• 10 Years of Relevant Experience

• See 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!
• Alcon provides a robust benefits package including health, life, retirement, flexible time off and much more.
• Travel  - up to 20%
• Sponsorship - No
• Relocation - No

See your impact at alcon.com/careers 

Alcon 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 alcon.recruitment@alcon.com and let us know the nature of your request and your contact information.