Cost Engineer - Consumer Goods
McKinsey & Company · Wrocław, Poland · 4d ago
Mid levelOn-siteSoftware Engineering
Who you'll work with
Driving lasting impact and building long-term capabilities with our clients is not easy work. You are the kind of person who thrives in a high performance/high reward culture - doing hard things, picking yourself up when you stumble, and having the resilience to try another way forward.
In return for your drive, determination, and curiosity, we'll provide the resources, mentorship, and opportunities you need to become a stronger leader faster than you ever thought possible. Your colleagues—at all levels—will invest deeply in your development, just as much as they invest in delivering exceptional results for clients. Every day, you'll receive apprenticeship, coaching, and exposure that will accelerate your growth in ways you won’t find anywhere else.
When you join us, you will have:
- Continuous learning: Our learning and apprenticeship culture, backed by structured programs, is all about helping you grow while creating an environment where feedback is clear, actionable, and focused on your development. The real magic happens when you take the input from others to heart and embrace the fast-paced learning experience, owning your journey.
- A voice that matters: From day one, we value your ideas and contributions. You’ll make a tangible impact by offering innovative ideas and practical solutions. We not only encourage diverse perspectives, but they are critical in driving us toward the best possible outcomes.
- Global community: With colleagues across 65+ countries and over 100 different nationalities, our firm’s diversity fuels creativity and helps us come up with the best solutions for our clients. Plus, you’ll have the opportunity to learn from exceptional colleagues with diverse backgrounds and experiences.
- World-class benefits: On top of a competitive salary (based on your location, experience, and skills), we provide a comprehensive benefits package to enable holistic well-being for you and your family.
What you'll do
You will act as a knowledge consultant in product development and cost engineering-related projects.
You will be based in our Client Capabilities Office in Wroclaw as part of McKinsey’s Product Development and Procurement team. In this role, you will support client service for consumer goods and FMCG topics, with a particular focus on Design-to-Value, product cost optimization, and product improvement. The team works across industries, including consumer goods, and combines engineering depth with hands-on problem solving to help clients improve product performance, cost, and value.
You will act as a knowledge consultant in product development–related projects, helping teams identify practical product and cost improvement opportunities. You will work on Design-to-Value and target costing projects, support product teardown and redesign activities in our laboratories, and help translate technical insights into actions our clients can implement.
A core part of your role will be bringing an end-to-end engineering view of the product value stream from goods to production through packaging processes. You will analyze how products are designed, manufactured, and packaged, and help identify opportunities to improve cost, quality, manufacturability, and customer value. You will also contribute to product cost modeling, competitive benchmarking, and technical analysis across a range of consumer categories and materials.
You will work closely with colleagues across McKinsey’s global network and contribute to the firm’s knowledge base in product development, value engineering, and cost optimization. Along the way, you will receive exceptional training, apprenticeship, coaching, and mentoring.
There is a flexibility to hire at junior or analyst level, depending on your experience.
Your background
- Master’s degree in process engineering, packaging engineering, product engineering, food engineering, chemical engineering, or related fields.
- 1+ years of professional experience ideally in a process engineering role. Good fit also R&D engineers, technologist, or similar roles.
- Prior experience in consumer goods or FMCG is strongly preferred
- Ability to analyze products end to end, from component and material choices to manufacturing and packaging processes.
- Direct experience with consumer products production lines, ideally spanning goods production through packaging processes.
- Interest in working across multiple product categories and materials rather than in a single narrow specialization.
- Experience in product development, manufacturing, cost optimization, value engineering, DFMA, prototyping, or target costing is an advantage.
- Strong analytical and quantitative problem-solving skills.
- Ability to work collaboratively with colleagues and clients in a team environment.
- Willingness to travel.
- Language fluency skills to communicate complex ideas effectively, both verbally and in writing, in English