Vice President, Product Engineering

Lumentum • San Jose, CA

8d

About The Position

The Vice President of Product Engineering is the senior leader accountable for product engineering strategy, execution, and organizational performance across multiple wafer fabrication sites producing indium phosphide (InP)-based optoelectronic devices. Reporting to the EVP of Global Fabs, this role builds and leads a high-performing, data-driven product engineering organization that turns customer and business requirements into stable, scalable, high-yielding, and reliable manufacturing solutions.

The VP partners with wafer-fab operations, process engineering, device design, epitaxy, test, reliability, quality, supply chain, packaging, sales, and program management. The role establishes common methods and priorities across fabs and ensures products are supported throughout development, qualification, production ramp, sustaining, cost reduction, and end-of-life management.

The position leads global product engineering strategy, teams, operating practices, technical roadmaps, and budgets. It oversees new product introduction and manufacturing readiness; product yield, performance, reliability, and cost; multi-fab governance and operational excellence; and customer, quality, and business partnerships. Success includes predictable product qualification and ramp, sustained improvements in yield and quality, reduced variability and customer disruption, consistent engineering governance across fabs, and a scalable organization with a strong leadership bench.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, materials science, physics, chemical engineering, mechanical engineering, or a related technical field.
• Typically 15 or more years of progressive experience in semiconductor, photonics, or optoelectronic product engineering, including substantial leadership experience in a manufacturing environment.
• Demonstrated success leading product engineering across multiple products, technologies, manufacturing sites, or geographically distributed teams.
• Deep understanding of semiconductor or optoelectronic device manufacturing, preferably including compound semiconductor materials, epitaxy, wafer fabrication, optical and electrical test, reliability, and packaging interfaces.
• Proven record of improving yield, product performance, reliability, manufacturing stability, cycle time, and cost through data-driven engineering.
• Strong knowledge of new product introduction, product qualification, production ramp, configuration and change control, statistical methods, and structured problem-solving tools.
• Experience building organizations, developing leaders, managing technical talent, and prioritizing resources across a complex product portfolio.
• Executive-level communication skills and ability to influence engineering, operations, quality, commercial, finance, and customer organizations.
• Ability to travel regularly among wafer-fab locations, suppliers, partners, and customer sites as business needs require.

Nice To Haves

• An advanced technical or business degree is strongly preferred.
• Experience with InP-based lasers, photodetectors, modulators, photonic integrated circuits, or related optoelectronic components.
• Experience supporting high-volume wafer fabrication and downstream assembly and test operations for telecom, datacom, sensing, aerospace, defense, or other high-reliability markets.
• Familiarity with automated data systems, manufacturing execution systems, product lifecycle management, statistical analysis platforms, and advanced analytics.
• Experience with fab-to-fab product transfer, external foundry or supplier management, and customer qualification programs.
• Working knowledge of relevant semiconductor and quality standards, such as ISO 9001 and applicable automotive, telecom, aerospace, or customer-specific requirements.

Responsibilities

• Own the global product engineering strategy, operating model, staffing plan, technical roadmap, and budget for multiple InP wafer fabs.
• Lead, develop, and retain product engineering leaders and technical teams responsible for new product introduction, production ramp, sustaining engineering, yield improvement, test strategy, product characterization, and cost reduction.
• Define product ownership, decision rights, escalation paths, and performance expectations across sites; foster technical rigor, accountability, rapid problem solving, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
• Lead transfer of new InP-based optoelectronic products from design and development into qualified, repeatable, high-volume manufacturing.
• Establish product release criteria, manufacturing readiness reviews, qualification plans, control plans, test limits, data requirements, and production ramp plans.
• Ensure design-for-manufacturability, design-for-test, and design-for-reliability practices are incorporated early in the product lifecycle.
• Coordinate product and process transfers between fabs, addressing equivalency, documentation, change control, risk management, and customer requirements.
• Own product yield, electrical and optical performance, test yield, outgoing quality, product reliability, and cost improvement roadmaps.
• Drive structured problem solving using statistical process control, design of experiments, fault isolation, root-cause analysis, failure analysis, and corrective and preventive action methods.
• Lead cross-functional improvement programs addressing wafer-level variation, device performance, defectivity, parametric yield, test coverage, reliability margins, and product cost.
• Establish methods to correlate epitaxy, wafer fabrication, wafer-level test, die-level test, packaging, final test, and field performance data.
• Ensure product specifications, guard bands, screening methods, and test limits are technically justified and aligned with customer and reliability requirements.
• Standardize product engineering processes, metrics, data systems, documentation, and technical reviews across manufacturing sites while accounting for site-specific capabilities.
• Chair regular product performance, yield, quality, reliability, and manufacturing readiness reviews with fab and functional leaders.
• Develop capacity and resource plans aligned with product demand, technology roadmaps, fab capabilities, and business priorities.
• Partner with operations and process engineering to resolve constraints, improve cycle time, reduce variability, and sustain production continuity.
• Provide executive-level visibility into product risks, recovery plans, customer impacts, investment needs, and business tradeoffs.
• Serve as the senior technical interface for critical product performance, yield, quality, reliability, and customer escalation matters.
• Partner with Quality to ensure compliance with applicable quality management systems, product qualification requirements, change-control processes, and customer-specific standards.
• Support product portfolio decisions with fact-based assessments of technical readiness, manufacturing risk, yield, cost, capital requirements, and lifecycle economics.
• Work with commercial and program teams to translate customer requirements into executable product and manufacturing plans.
• Protect intellectual property and ensure disciplined handling of technical, customer, and manufacturing information.
• Travel regularly among wafer-fab locations, suppliers, partners, and customer sites as business needs require.

Benefits

• The company may offer annual bonus, commission for certain sales roles, equity, and health and welfare benefits as part of competitive total compensation packages.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Executive