Hi, I'm
Jinyoung Son
Commercial & customer-facing professional — pricing, cost, and quality in battery and advanced materials.
Ex-LG Chem, now based in the Hudson Valley, New York.
Open to commercial, account management, pricing, and supplier quality roles — remote or hybrid
What I'm looking for
Account Manager · Commercial / Pricing Manager · Cost Analyst · Supplier Quality Engineer
Manufacturing first — but the cost-and-quality toolkit travels to any industry.
Based in the Hudson Valley, NY. Remote or hybrid preferred; open to on-site in the NYC metro area and northern New Jersey.
U.S. work authorization (EAD) in final processing — no employer sponsorship needed.
Bilingual in Korean and English, based in the U.S. — I know how Korean manufacturing organizations work from the inside, and I'm on this side of the ocean.
What I do
I've worked on both sides of manufacturing competitiveness: making sure the product is right, and making sure the business behind it works. Over three and a half years at LG Chem — a global leader in chemical and battery materials — I moved from shop-floor quality assurance to executive-level pricing strategy.
That path gave me an uncommon combination: I can walk a production line and talk IQC/PQC/OQC and supplier quality, then sit down with commercial teams and build the cost and pricing story that wins the deal. What ties it together is competitiveness — quality customers can trust, at a cost the business can sustain.
I've also spent both roles at the customer interface. In quality that meant owning claim response end to end — including face-to-face negotiations abroad when the relationship was worth more than the win. In pricing it meant building the cost logic that had to hold up in front of a customer. Working in Korean and English across Korea-based teams and overseas sites was simply part of the job.
Experience
Pricing & Marketing Strategy Associate
LG Chem · Cathode Materials · Jan 2025 – Apr 2026
- Owned pricing for cathode materials in the EV battery value chain — managing selling price and manufacturing cost together to control contribution margin and gross profit.
- Structured commercial terms on multi-year booked volume (typically 2–3 years), including forward annual price schedules and volume-tiered pricing.
- Led RFI/RFQ response end to end, including competitive bids whose pricing analysis leadership adopted to win new program awards.
Spotlight — how this role actually worked, from purpose to lesson:
1Purpose
Prices that win orders and hold margin
- Know what each product truly costs to make — plant by plant, at home and overseas
- Ground every quote and order-intake decision in that number
2Process
Connect the ledger, the market, and the shop floor
- Analyzed manufacturing cost in ERP across all accounting lines — depreciation, labor, SG&A
- Factored competitor pricing intelligence, raw-material supply, tariffs and China VAT into price positioning
- Walked domestic and overseas production sites to tie process structure to cost structure — numbers alone don't tell you why a cost exists
3Result
Strategy leadership could act on
- Product-level pricing strategies and order-intake proposals
- Executive briefings that backed deal decisions with data
4Lesson
What the money seat taught me
- Excel, data analysis, and ERP as everyday working tools
- Judging by the numbers — always in terms of cost structure, revenue, and P&L
- Writing reports decision-makers can actually act on
- Pricing touches every team's money, so communicating with every department was part of the job
Quality Assurance Specialist
LG Chem · Battery Pack Materials · May 2023 – Dec 2024
- Served as the direct customer contact for quality — claim response by email, phone, and on-site — with 3D/8D corrective action reports submitted straight to the customer.
- Negotiated liability and compensation scope on customer claims face-to-face, including overseas travel, settling with minimal loss while keeping the relationship intact.
- Owned the full quality cycle — IQC, PQC, OQC — in a new business development group, and audited supplier quality systems annually.
Spotlight — how this role actually worked, from purpose to lesson:
1Purpose
Ship only lots a customer can trust
- Keep every product inside all COA property specs — spec-in, lot after lot
- When something goes wrong, contain it fast and protect the relationship
2Process
Monitor, contain, dig for the root cause
- Routinely monitored every lot against COA specs, raising inspection frequency whenever values drifted
- On an issue: tracked the affected and at-risk lots and held shipments
- Hunted root causes with quality tests and COA re-inspection — rarely straightforward — then judged whether fixes should carry into future lots
- Closed every issue with a structured 3D/8D report
- Managed suppliers as well — audited their quality systems every year, and when a problem was reported, went on-site to resolve it
3Result
Issues closed, trust kept
- Drifting parameters caught before they became customer claims
- Liability and compensation scope settled with minimal loss to the company — without burning the relationship
- When trust mattered more than the win, negotiated face-to-face, including overseas trips
4Lesson
What the quality seat taught me
- Communicating with customers — and suppliers — when the stakes are high
- Reading data hard enough to find what it is really saying
- Negotiation — balancing today's loss against long-term trust
- An auditor's eye — no formal certification, but enough to judge whether a quality system holds up
Quality Assurance Specialist
LG Chem · Polarizer Film · Oct 2022 – Apr 2023
- Performed outgoing quality control (OQC) for polarizer film products.
- Resolved customer claims through structured 3D and 8D root-cause analysis.
Skills
Education
Konkuk University — B.S. in Mathematics (Seoul, South Korea)
This site is my playground
I built and run sonnyplot.com myself, working with AI — the pages, the live market data widget on the home page, and the automated deploy pipeline behind it. I write about those experiments on the blog (in Korean). A math degree, a quality engineer's habits, and a lot of curiosity about what AI can do.
Get in touch
The best way to reach me is LinkedIn — jinyoung-son — or email me at contact@sonnyplot.com.