Application Development Engineer

To make electronics, you need chips, wafers, transistors, reticles, and... To make these, you must see, test and manufacture them at scale—faster and better than ever before. That's where KLA comes in. Whether you're early in your career or an experienced professional, you'll solve complex challenges, work alongside brilliant minds and help shape the future of technology.

Group/Division

The Semiconductor Products and Customers (Semi PC) business unit designs, builds and sells KLA’s product portfolio to help chip manufacturers meet high-quality standards for technologies like AI, data centers, automotive and electronic devices. Our inspection, metrology, and analytics systems detect and monitor defects across logic and memory chips, specialty semiconductors, wafers, reticles, advanced packaging, process equipment and materials. We also develop technologies for specialty processes, IC substrates, and PCB manufacturing, including etch and deposition, component inspection, and imaging and analytics. The Broadband Plasma (BBP) division is the market-leading optical inspection system used by logic, foundry, and memory customers to detect critical defects at advanced nodes. These tools combine broadband plasma technology with unmatched sensitivity and speed to support high-volume manufacturing.

What You'll Do

In this role, you will play a key part in advancing business priorities by delivering high-impact work across your area of expertise.

Company Overview

KLA is a global leader in diversified electronics for the semiconductor manufacturing ecosystem. Virtually every electronic device in the world is produced using our technologies. No laptop, smartphone, wearable device, voice-controlled gadget, flexible screen, VR device or smart car would have made it into your hands without us. KLA invents systems and solutions for the manufacturing of wafers and reticles, integrated circuits, packaging, printed circuit boards and flat panel displays. The innovative ideas and devices that are advancing humanity all begin with inspiration, research and development. KLA focuses more than average on innovation and in 2019 we invested 15% of sales back into R&D. Our expert teams of physicists, engineers, data scientists and problem-solvers work together with the world’s leading technology providers to accelerate the delivery of tomorrow’s electronic devices. Life here is exciting and our teams thrive on tackling really hard problems. There is never a dull moment with us.

Group/Division

With over 40 years of semiconductor process control experience, chipmakers around the globe rely on KLA to ensure that their fabs ramp next-generation devices to volume production quickly and cost-effectively. Enabling the movement towards advanced chip design, KLA's Global Products Group (GPG), which is responsible for creating all of KLA’s metrology and inspection products, is looking for the best and the brightest research scientist, software engineers, application development engineers, and senior product technology process engineers. The Broadband Plasma Division (BBP) provides market-leading patterned wafer optical inspection systems for leading-edge IC manufacturing. Logic, foundry, and memory customers depend on BBP products to detect yield-critical defects for process debug and excursion monitoring at advanced process nodes. BBP flagship products include the 29xx and 39xx series which leverage Broadband Plasma technology to capture a wide range of defects with ultimate sensitivity at the optical inspection speeds needed for inline defect monitoring.

Application Development Engineer

Responsibilities:

• Customer support: Product value demonstration during beta testing, Head-to-Heads (H2H) and tools in the ramp phase, thereby enabling product penetration/adoption at world-wide customers. This includes-investigating semiconductor manufacturing yield issues and providing inspection solutions; creating & sharing product value statements and use-cases with engineering, marketing and sales groups; training customers and other applications engineers.
• Product Demonstration: Provide specific product demonstrations on all aspects of highly complex products to customers and assess potential applications to meet customer needs
• Product Characterization: Work on test plan development and execute detailed characterization of the tool/algorithm performance and provides clear feedback to the Engineering teams for product improvement, especially during Alpha/Beta tests.
• Problem Diagnosis/Troubleshooting: Respond to customer requests and perform routine to moderately complex problem diagnosis and problem resolution.
• Customer Relationship: Interacts with customers to educate and coordinate activities. Good working knowledge of customer use case and is expected to understand customer needs and improve customer relations.
• Training: Conduct customer product demonstrations and technical training including on-site training of Field Applications Engineers and end users.
• Documentation: Document all test results and lessons learned in BKMs (Best Known Methods), training documents, Demo reports, or, Alpha/Beta test reports and transfer product knowledge to Field Applications teams.
• Presentation/Communication Skills: Generate demo and test reports and strong presentation skills for internal and customer review.

Requirements:

• We are looking for high energy, self-driven and motivated engineers who are interested in working in High Tech. The semiconductor space is a fast paced, high stress environment that gives applications engineers a lot of autonomy to work and drive projects on their own. Ideal candidates appreciate the opportunity to have high levels of accountability, working well with limited supervision and thrive in a work environment where they can drive projects on their own.
• Candidate must have Master’s or bachelor's degree in Engineering, Physics, Material Science, or related fields.
• Must have excellent oral and written communication, organizational, analytical, and interpersonal skills.
• Candidate must be a strong team player.
• >80% travel will be required

Minimum Qualifications

Master's Level Degree and 0 years related work experience; Bachelor's Level Degree and related work experience of 2 years

About KLA

We provide advanced inspection tools, metrology systems, process solutions, and computational analytics that make electronics possible, tackling complex challenges. From electron and photon optics to machine learning and data analytics, we seek perfection at the most fundamental level of matter in the universe. If you want to make electronics that push industries forward and make the world a better place, join us.

Use of AI Statement 

At KLA, our interviews seek to understand your individual skills, problem-solving approach and authentic thinking. To ensure a fair and consistent evaluation, the use of AI, recording tools or other technologies to generate, suggest or provide responses during interviews—whether virtual or in person—is not permitted unless explicitly approved in advance as part of a reasonable accommodation or invited by the interviewer. Use of these tools may interfere with our ability to evaluate your individual qualifications and affect your candidacy. KLA is committed to advancing innovation through responsible AI, and we value candidates who share this mindset.

We offer a competitive, family friendly total rewards package. We design our programs to reflect our commitment to an inclusive environment, while ensuring we provide benefits that meet the diverse needs of our employees.

KLA is proud to be an equal opportunity employer.