Cost Estimating Specialist

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What we offer:

Group Summary:

Seeking a highly analytical and proactive Costing Specialist to support high complexity programs, with a strong focus on cost tracking and engineering change management. This role is essential in ensuring financial accuracy and responsiveness to dynamic program requirements, particularly for global OEMs. The ideal candidate will bring deep costing expertise, cross-functional collaboration skills, and a strong understanding of automotive program lifecycles.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities

Cost Tracking & Analysis

• Maintain detailed cost tracking for assigned programs, ensuring alignment with budget targets and commercial expectations.
• Monitor actual vs. forecasted costs for Materials, Tooling, Labor, and Overhead; investigate and explain variances.
• Develop and update cost models to reflect changes in scope, design, or sourcing. Present this information to the program team and/or Cost Estimating Manager.

Tracks, audits and compare actual tooling expenditures to the established budget as needed and provide status reports on a regular basis

Engineering Change Management

• Lead financial impact assessments for engineering changes (ECRs/ECNs), including cost roll-ups and margin analysis through the add/delete process.
• Collaborate with Engineering, Program Management, and Purchasing to ensure timely and accurate costing of changes.
• Maintain traceability of cost impacts along key program financial metrics throughout the program lifecycle.
• Participate in setting cost targets and pricing to improve margins.

Customer Program Support

• Provide cost input for RFQs, commercial negotiations, and customer pricing strategies.
• Thorough understanding OEMs costing standards to align on cost expectations, formats, and reporting requirements.
• Supports and justifies cost/pricing structure to the customer as required, under the direction of the department manager and with the coordination of Sales department.
• Support gate reviews and financial checkpoints with robust cost documentation and insights.

Process & System Improvement

• Enhance costing tools, templates, and processes to improve accuracy and efficiency.
• Support ERP and PLM system integration for better cost visibility and change tracking.
• Drive continuous improvement initiatives in cost governance and data integrity.
• Contributes to VA/VE initiatives.
• Supports Internal / External Audit efforts regarding ISO 9001:2015, IATF 16949 Certification for remote site location (Group Office).
• Supports the requirements as detailed in Standard Operating Procedure 8000 (Quality Management System).
• Ensure employees work in the manner consistent with the organizations established objectives and targets utilizing protective equipment, devices, measures, and procedures as promulgated by state and federal regulations. Establish clear goals for workplace health and safety. Complete safety talks, safety meetings, and required training occur, as defined.

Qualifications

To perform this job successfully, an individual must be able to perform each essential duty and responsibility satisfactorily. The requirements listed below are representative of the knowledge, skill, ability and/or physical demands required. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.

Education

Bachelor’s Degree (or bachelor’s equivalency) in accounting, finance, or engineering; or equivalent combination of education and work experience.

Experience/Special Knowledge/Skills

• Minimum 7 years’ experience in an automotive manufacturing/engineering related environment.
• 5 years of experience in costing, preferably in automotive or manufacturing sectors.
• Strong understanding of cost accounting principles and ERP systems (SAP, Oracle, etc.).
• Advanced Excel and financial modeling skills; experience with PLM and change management systems.
• Strong organizational skills and the ability to successfully coordinate and complete multiple tasks within established and changing deadlines.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.
• Ability to manage multiple high-complexity programs in a fast-paced environment
• CAD/TeamCenter experience preferred.
• Demonstrated successful performance with independent problem solving. Analytical skills to review and interpret data and make recommendations regarding costs.

Awareness, Unity, Empowerment:

At Magna, we believe that a diverse workforce is critical to our success. That’s why we are proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We hire on the basis of experience and qualifications, and in consideration of job requirements, regardless of, in particular, color, ancestry, religion, gender, origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability or gender identity. Magna takes the privacy of your personal information seriously. We discourage you from sending applications via email or traditional mail to comply with GDPR requirements and your local Data Privacy Law.