Principal Failure Analysis Engineer

Western Digital•Irvine, CA

About The Position

Join our dynamic and collaborative team to help with WD customer failure analysis in support of requests from our customers. As Principal FA Lead, you will be managing Failure Analysis activities spanning across multiple hard disk drives labs. You will collaborate with worldwide FA teams and review failure analysis reports from the labs and collaborate with labs and subject matter experts to decide on best course of action for identifying underlying causes of failures and drive problems. You will be in charge of the overall FA summaries with key findings and supporting images from the labs. These summaries are used to communicate failure modes and causes to the customers, field application engineers, quality managers, manufacturing, or development teams. You will have multiple opportunities to help improve FA processes and tools based on learnings from FA work. Over time, you will gain expertise allowing you to be one of few HDD FA experts in the world!

Requirements

Hard disk drive failure analysis experience
Proven problem-solving skills
Proven leadership skills
Effective at multi-tasking, organization and time management
Self-motivated
Demonstrates patience, confidence, and composure
Detailed knowledge of hard drives and knowledge of factory processes and storage applications
Strong written and verbal communication skills
Excellent interpersonal and teamworking skills
Candidates must demonstrate relevant experience, interest and aptitude in both analytical and practical aspects of the above topics
BS/MS in EE, ME, IE, or equivalent
2+ years of Failure Analysis experience with Western Digital enterprise or client hard drives highly desired

Nice To Haves

Knowledge and experience with Data Analytics is a big plus
Knowledge and experience with Python, C++, and/or SQL is a big plus
Knowledge and experience with FIO performance testing is a plus
Knowledge and experience with Reliability is a plus

Responsibilities

Manage FA activities, priorities and identify causes of failures and related drive problems on customer and field drives within the corresponding priority time frame
Summarize FA results based on key lab findings and causes of failure
Pro-actively engage with subject matter experts in PCBA, Firmware, Reliability, Data Analytics, FA Tools, Customer Technical Support and Customer Quality Managers, Factory FA and Quality teams on customer issues
Follow department/work group processes
Develop, improve, and document failure analysis procedures, processes, and requirements
Participate in selected Program/Product/Customer issue resolution meetings and act as an integral part of the issue resolution team
Effectively present information, ideas, and your perspective to peers, team members and managers
Create and meet schedules for high priority FA and process improvements
Brainstorm, be open to inputs and recommend team improvements and team process improvements
Interact with Development teams to understand new technology, develop associated failure analysis tools, processes, and documentation
Define and work on tool improvements related to FA such as drive log visualizations and FIO tests
Learn about product failures from development teams
Effectively communicate results and status with management and team members and participate in resolving product and customer issues by providing meaningful insights.

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