Sr. Principal Reliability Engineer

Coherent • Fremont, CA

2d • Onsite

About The Position

This role involves thoroughly reviewing new product designs from the architectural definition stage and collaborating closely with lead RF and optical designers, suppliers, mechanical designers, and process engineers to identify potential risks and mitigation plans to prevent product failures. The engineer will assess field risks associated with new product platforms, components, assembly challenges, and system architectures to define, prioritize, track, and validate reliability improvements throughout the New Product Introduction (NPI) process. This includes developing new methodologies to analyze reliability estimates, applying industry standard approaches, field statistics, and component data. A key responsibility is formulating a product validation strategy to confirm product stability and robustness while balancing customer/business constraints and ensuring compliance to rigorous quality and reliability criteria. The role also entails defining and executing qualification plans, tests, and monitoring progress, leveraging internal, external, and offshore test infrastructure and data analysis. Collaboration with suppliers and NPI teams, providing critical technical data throughout product development and production ramp, and analyzing aging data to establish lifetime and random failure estimates are also crucial. The engineer will present reliability assessments and qualification status to key customers and provide regular reliability updates, including product risk assessments based on technical justifications. Travel to suppliers and factories will be required to build relationships and assess process risk, scalability challenges, and manufacturing readiness.

Requirements

• M.S. or higher in Engineering or related field
• Minimum 15 years of experience in the telecom or datacom industry at the transceiver, system, or subassembly level
• Optical and electrical performance in transceivers, switches, data centers, etc.
• Extensive knowledge of materials, adhesives, interconnects, packaging technology, advanced photonics devices.
• Technical understanding of optical and electrical test measurements.
• Experience with reliability statistics, physics of failure, and failure analysis methodologies.
• Ability to leverage a wide variety of reliability approaches to establish the most reasonable estimates with many unknowns and lack of data.
• Ability to synthesize complex situations into communications which deliver key points understandable by the team and decision-makers.
• Escalate issues to drive actions/decisions to ensure success.
• Professional, respectful, honest communication.
• Logical, data-based reasoning for conclusions and recommendations.
• Insightful and creative solutions.
• Willingness to work off-core-hours on occasion to provide more effective communication and collaboration with Asia reliability labs.

Responsibilities

• Thoroughly review new product designs from the architectural definition stage and collaborate closely with lead RF and optical designers, suppliers, mechanical designers, process engineers to identify potential risks and mitigation plans to prevent product failures.
• Assess field risks associated w/ new product platforms, components, assembly challenges, and system architectures to define, prioritize, track, and validate reliability improvements throughout the NPI process.
• Develop new methodologies early in NPI to analyze reliability estimates, applying a combination of known and unknown industry standard approaches, field statistics, and component data.
• Formulate a product validation strategy to confirm product stability and robustness while balancing any customer/business constraints, ensuring compliance to rigorous quality and reliability criteria set by Coherent and our customers.
• Define the qualification plan, tests, resource, execute, and monitor progress of the qualification program, including leverage of internal, external, and offshore locations for test infrastructure and data analysis.
• Collaborate closely with supplier and NPI teams, providing critical technical data throughout all phases of product development and steep production ramp.
• Analyze aging data to establish lifetime and random failure estimates and present the reliability assessments and qualification status to key customers throughout the co-development process.
• Provide regular reliability updates to customers, presenting product risk assessments based on technical justifications.
• Travel to suppliers and factories will be required to build relationships and best assess process risk, scalability challenges, and manufacturing readiness.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal
• Number of Employees: 5,001-10,000 employees