Technical search for electronics manufacturing in Vietnam.
Electronics is where Vietnam's manufacturing base actually is — the country's largest export sector, built first on Samsung's phone plants and now on a second wave of EMS and ODM suppliers moving laptop, tablet, wearable and networking production here. US tariff rules that penalise transshipment are pushing that work beyond final assembly into local components and supply chains. Tens of thousands of engineers have spent a decade inside these operations, and the depth of that pool is the single biggest advantage this market has.
But depth at scale creates its own problem. The same job title means very different things at a site running high-mix industrial boards and one running twelve million identical units a quarter. An NPI engineer at the first has probably touched every stage of a build — DFM review, stencil and reflow profile, ICT and functional test, first article inspection. At the second, they may have owned one transfer step, very well, for six years.
Neither is better. They're just not interchangeable, and a CV won't tell you which one you're reading. The mismatch usually surfaces three months in, when the person who ran a mature line is asked to stand up a new one — or the reverse.
Roles we search for
NPI and industrialisation
NPI engineer · NPI manager · DFM engineer · Product transfer lead · Industrialisation engineer · Pilot line manager · Prototype engineer · NPI programme manager
SMT and process engineering
SMT process engineer · Reflow and soldering engineer · Wave and selective soldering engineer · AOI and SPI engineer · Stencil and solder paste engineer · Assembly process engineer · Box build and system assembly engineer · Conformal coating and potting engineer · Manufacturing engineer · Process automation engineer
Hardware and product engineering
Hardware design engineer · Schematic design engineer · PCB layout engineer · Signal integrity engineer · Power electronics engineer · RF and antenna engineer · EMC and compliance engineer · Embedded firmware engineer · Component engineer · Hardware architect
Mechanical, tooling and plastics
Mechanical design engineer · Tooling and mould engineer · Injection moulding engineer · CNC and machining engineer · Surface treatment engineer · Jig and fixture engineer · Mechanical assembly engineer
Test engineering
Test engineering manager · ICT engineer · Functional test engineer · Test fixture engineer · Boundary scan engineer · Test software engineer · Burn-in and reliability test engineer · Calibration engineer
Quality and reliability
Quality manager · Process quality engineer · QA engineer · QC engineer · IQC and OQC supervisor · Supplier quality engineer · Customer quality engineer · Reliability engineer · Failure analysis engineer · Quality systems engineer · Regulatory and certification engineer
Equipment and maintenance
Equipment engineer · Equipment engineering manager · SMT line maintenance engineer · Maintenance manager · Facilities manager · Utilities engineer · ESD and cleanroom engineer
Production and operations
Production manager · Manufacturing manager · Shift manager · Line leader · Industrial engineer · Industrial engineering manager · Production planning manager · Capacity and MPS planner · MES and manufacturing systems engineer · Lean and continuous improvement manager
Supply chain and materials
Materials manager · Procurement engineer · Commodity manager · Sourcing manager · Cost engineer · Planning manager · Supplier development engineer · Warehouse and logistics manager
Leadership
Site general manager · Plant manager · Operations director · Engineering director · R&D and hardware director · Quality director · Supply chain director · Programme director
These searches start at a gross monthly package of around 50 million VND, or below that when several roles are open at once.
What we look at
Product mix and volume. High-mix low-volume and mass production are different professions, and we separate the lines they owned from the ones they supported. Yield, first-pass yield and DPPM before and after their involvement, and whether the gain held once they moved on. For process and equipment roles: which platforms they ran — SMT, SPI, AOI, X-ray, ICT and functional test — how many unplanned stoppages a line had on their watch, and whether they have installed and qualified a new line. For NPI: how many transfers from prototype to mass production they completed, where the bottleneck was each time, and whether the line hit the committed capacity. For test engineering: which fixtures and programs they wrote, and what the false failure rate was. For hardware and product engineering: which boards they designed end to end, how many spins to production, and whether the design passed EMC and safety certification first time. For mechanical, tooling and plastics: tool life, cycle time, and what they changed to fix a moulding defect at source rather than screen it out. For quality roles: which customers audited them and to which standard, IPC-A-610 or IATF 16949 for automotive, what the findings were, and how the 8D was closed. For supply chain: which components they localised or second-sourced, and what happened to cost and quality afterwards.
The deep pool here is in assembly, test and process. It is thinner in hardware design, system-level test engineering and the leadership layer above plant manager — roles that Vietnam's electronics sector has historically filled from Korea, Taiwan, China and Japan. The picture is improving year by year, but not yet fast enough to fill those roles locally on a normal timeline. When a brief sits there, we say so before it starts, and talk through whether the specification or the schedule is the thing that should move.