Principal Engineer

Job Description

Western Digital is seeking a test and device characterization engineer to join our Advanced Reader Development engineering team in San Jose, CA.  The successful candidate will be part of a growing team developing Western Digital’s next generation of readback sensors for hard disk applications.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities

• Collect, process, analyze electrical data from spintronic sensors
• Responsible for wafer and device level testing of spintronic sensors – including day-to-day lab and data management
• Work closely with design and modeling groups to predict and explain results
• Bring up new laboratory for device-level magnetic testing:  Specifying laboratory test equipment and writing test/analysis code
• Working with integration engineers to conduct failure analysis utilizing data from materials analysis as well as electrical test
• Keep up-to-date on recent advances in spintronics, magnetic materials and devices; identify new technologies and advances in physics that would benefit WDs read head development

Qualifications

Required:

• MS+ 4 years of experience with a degree in Physics, Materials Science, Electrical Engineering or related field.  
• Prior experience in device test and characterization in disk drives, magnetic memory, semiconductor, optoelectronics or solid-state physics
• Hands-on experience with test equipment: Lock-in amplifiers, current sources, wafer probers etc.
• Prior experience in test equipment integration and coding using Labview, LabWindows, Matlab or similar 
• Demonstrated ability to summarize complex data in clear and concise reports

Preferred:

• Ph.D. degree preferred.
• Background in magnetic devices, spintronics or MRAM
• Device fabrication or process integration experience is a plus

Skills: 

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills
• Data analysis skills to manipulate and analyze large data sets with tools such as JMP, R, Python or similar packages