Director, Employee Experience

Western Digital•San Jose, CA

3h•Onsite

About The Position

At WD, our vision is to power global innovation and push the boundaries of technology to make what you thought was once impossible, possible. WD is a company of problem solvers, enabling people to achieve extraordinary things with technology, from putting a man on the moon to capturing the first-ever picture of a black hole. The company offers an expansive portfolio of technologies, HDDs, and platforms for business, creative professionals, and consumers under Western Digital®, WD®, and WD_BLACK™ brands. WD is a key partner to large and high-growth organizations, enabling safer cities, powering data centers for hyperscale cloud providers, and meeting the data storage needs of the AI era. The Director, HR Experience Partners, is a senior leadership role responsible for enabling and continuously improving high quality, consistent employee and manager experience across multiple regions. This role partners with HR Operations, HR Centers of Excellence, HR Business Partners, and Legal to ensure enterprise people strategies, programs, and processes are delivered in a cohesive, intuitive, and experience-led way. The Director leads a global HR Experience Partner team focused on shaping end-to-end people journeys, strengthening manager effectiveness through scalable experiences, and supporting regional talent strategies through thoughtful, localized delivery. The role ensures core HR programs are implemented with consistency and clarity, reducing friction for managers and employees while respecting regional and regulatory nuances. This position translates people strategies, policies, and programs into practical, usable experiences centered on key moments across the employee lifecycle, improving how people processes are experienced, understood, and adopted. Operating at the intersection of experience optimization, operational execution, and change enablement, the Director leverages employee insights, operational data, and continuous feedback loops to identify pain points, improve usability, and elevate how employees and managers experience HR at scale. The Director, HR Experience Partners, serves as a critical connector between the business and how HR is experienced and understood.

Requirements

10+ years of progressive experience in employee experience, HR transformation, organizational effectiveness & manager enablement, with demonstrated impact in complex, matrixed organizations.
Demonstrates strong regulatory acumen by partnering with Legal, Employee Relations, and regional HR teams to ensure people practices meet country-specific employment requirements, while translating complex regulations into clear, actionable guidance that enables managers to make compliant, informed decisions.
Proven ability to build, lead, and scale high-performing global teams across multiple regions, cultures, and regulatory environments, with a focus on consistency of experience and local relevance.
Strong track record partnering with senior leaders, HR Business Partners, HR Operations, and Centers of Excellence to translate people strategies into practical, manager-ready experiences that address leadership, talent, and organizational needs.
Strong coaching, facilitation, and communication skills, with the ability to leverage storytelling to enable manager effectiveness, and drive alignment across diverse stakeholder groups without direct authority.
Sound judgment and strong influencing capability, grounded in accountability, trust, inclusion, and respect, with the ability to balance business priorities, employee experience, and risk considerations.
Demonstrated ability to operate effectively in ambiguity, manage multiple large-scale initiatives simultaneously, and adapt approaches in fast-changing, global business contexts.

Nice To Haves

Experience in technology or manufacturing environments strongly preferred.

Responsibilities

Partner with Talent Development & Inclusion (TD&I) to enable and embed core people-leader capabilities through locally relevant, experience-led delivery.
Build, develop, and lead a high-performing global HR Experience Partner team that provides just-in-time coaching, practical guidance, and manager-ready frameworks developed by TD&I and COEs.
Strengthen manager confidence, consistency, and accountability by translating leadership capability frameworks into clear expectations, tools, and moments-that-matter across the employee lifecycle.
Serve as a frontline experience multiplier, ensuring managers consistently understand how to apply people practices—not just what to do.
Drive the activation, adoption, and consistent experience of core HR programs across regions in close partnership with HRBPs, HR Operations and COEs.
Translate global HR initiatives into manager-ready practices that are intuitive, locally applicable, and scalable.
Enable leaders to engage effectively with HR programs by simplifying complexity and reinforcing expectations through coordinated communications, tools, and reinforcement.
Provide feedback loops to HRBPs, COEs and HR Operations to improve program usability and effectiveness based on lived manager and employee experiences.
Partner closely with HR Business Partners, Legal, HR Operations, and Centers of Excellence to deliver integrated, experienced-led people solutions aligned to evolving business priorities.
Act as a connector that balances business needs, employee experience, and risk awareness, ensuring consistency without sacrificing local relevance.
Enable HRBPs and leaders by clarifying roles, decision pathways, and escalation points within people processes.
Identify friction points between the business and HR and proactively address them through experience improvements and enablement.
Execution of talent strategies in partnership with HRBPs.
Collaborate with Legal, Employee Relations, and regional HR teams to ensure people practices comply with local employment laws, regulatory requirements and internal governance standards.
Interpret complex employment regulations and convert them into clear, practical guidance that empowers managers to make compliant, people-centered decisions.

Benefits

Paid vacation time
Paid sick leave
Medical/dental/vision insurance
Life, accident and disability insurance
Tax-advantaged flexible spending and health savings accounts
Employee assistance program
Other voluntary benefit programs such as supplemental life and AD&D, legal plan, pet insurance, critical illness, accident and hospital indemnity
Tuition reimbursement
Transit
The Applause Program
Employee stock purchase plan
The WD Savings 401(k) Plan
Eligible to be considered for bonuses under either WD’s Short Term Incentive Plan (“STI Plan”) or the Sales Incentive Plan (“SIP”)
May be eligible to participate in our annual Long-Term Incentive (LTI) program, which consists of restricted stock units (RSUs) or cash equivalents
RSU awards are also available to eligible new hires, subject to WD's Standard Terms and Conditions for Restricted Stock Unit Awards