EVP – Customer Operations — Engineering Centre

The mandate

A Budapest engineering centre delivers embedded, validation and platform work to product groups across Europe. Sponsors value its technical capability but experience the centre through separate programme managers, support channels and commercial reviews. Priorities can change without an explicit capacity decision, acceptance criteria are uneven and field issues travel back to engineers through personal escalation. A respected customer-operations leader has held those relationships together and will leave through a planned succession.

The EVP – Customer Operations will lead the customer-facing operating system for approximately 1,625 employees and material partners within a services perimeter near HUF 215 billion. Engineering leaders own design and delivery; product sponsors own market roadmaps. This executive owns demand agreements, service acceptance, issue resolution, sponsor governance, operational feedback and the accuracy of commitments made between them.

The new leader must institutionalise trust without bureaucratising it. Global customers need a clear route into the centre and engineers need protection from priority changes that arrive without trade-offs. Customer operations should reveal product and service consequences early, connect field evidence with technical backlogs and make ownership legible when several businesses share a component.

The work also spans different product calendars and customer languages. A release needed for one market may conflict with validation for another, while a locally urgent defect may reveal a reusable engineering issue. The EVP must create an escalation logic that recognises severity, installed exposure and contractual duty rather than the seniority of the person calling.

Why this seat is open

The incumbent will complete an agreed tenure and supports a four-to-six-month handover. This is a planned replacement, not an intervention following weak performance or conduct. The longer search window allows key sponsor relationships, live commitments and employee-representation obligations to transfer in an orderly sequence. Existing account and programme leaders retain authority until the successor formally assumes the role.

What you will own

• Create one sponsor and service-governance model across product groups without erasing legitimate contract differences.
• Establish demand, capacity and priority agreements that record which commitment changes when new work is accepted.
• Define acceptance evidence for engineering releases, transitions and support handovers.
• Build a closed loop from incidents, field use and customer complaints into engineering and product decisions.
• Chair cross-sponsor escalation for shared components and make trade-offs visible to accountable executives.
• Set the operating model for account, programme, service and customer-success roles, removing overlap and orphan ownership.
• Measure sponsor confidence, commitment reliability, resolution and adoption rather than meeting volume.
• Develop successors across regional customer operations and transfer relationships beyond the departing leader.

The first 12 months

During the first 90 days, the EVP will map every material sponsor, commitment, decision route and open escalation. The centre will adopt one interim priority protocol, and the 15 highest-impact commitments will have named acceptance and capacity owners. The successor will attend handovers with the incumbent but independently test assumptions with engineering and customers.

By month eight, three major product groups should use the new governance model. Customer evidence will feed a common backlog, priority changes will carry explicit consequences and service acceptance will no longer depend on informal programme-manager confirmation. The leadership structure will be complete, with relationship cover for critical accounts.

At year-end, commitment predictability should exceed 90%, high-severity resolution time should improve by 25% and repeat issues attributable to lost customer feedback should fall by 30%. Sponsor confidence should rise by at least 15 points from baseline, while no single executive remains the sole relationship holder for a material product group.

What the board will measure

• Customer promises aligned to engineering capacity and accepted by accountable sponsors.
• Faster, evidence-based resolution without escalation becoming the default demand route.
• Field and service insight visibly changing product or technical priorities.
• Continuity of strategic relationships through leadership succession.
• A customer-operations bench with clear roles and credible successors.

The person

You are a customer-operations, engineering-services or product-support executive who has represented a complex technical organisation to senior global sponsors. You understand lifecycle engineering and can distinguish a customer symptom from the engineering problem without claiming to be the chief engineer. Relevant experience includes industrial technology, software platforms, automotive engineering and global product-development centres.

You bring 22–28 years of experience and have governed at least HUF 125 billion of service or product commitments while leading or influencing 1,150 people or more. Evidence should include a priority conflict you resolved across major sponsors and a feedback mechanism that measurably reduced repeat failure. References must confirm that you made difficult commitment changes early rather than explaining missed dates late.

This role is based in Budapest with a hybrid pattern and regular European travel.

Compensation and terms

The base range is HUF 95–130 million plus annual incentive. Performance will reflect commitment integrity, customer outcomes, issue learning, succession and leadership quality rather than sponsor satisfaction alone. Final terms depend on relevant scale and current mix. The planned transition can accommodate a notice period of up to six months.

Confidentiality

The product groups, customers, incumbent and technical services are not named. Qualified candidates will receive details under reciprocal confidentiality after initial fit is established. The Budapest location and approximate population must not be used to infer or contact the employer.