Principal PCB / Hardware Quality Engineer

Job Description:

We are hiring a Principal PCB / Hardware Quality Engineer to support new product development and high-volume manufacturing.

In this role, you will need to apply your quality experience across four domains:  customer quality (returns root cause analysis and corrective action), supplier quality (audits, yield), new product development (reliability qualifications, design for reliability), and regulatory compliance (ISO, RoHS, conflict materials, safety, exports, electromagnetic interference).  Some international travel required, approximately 10%, but varies based on need.

Basic qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering.  
• Minimum of 10 years’ quality engineering experience.
• Be prepared to build new engineering processes for the organization from the ground up and be the sole subject matter expert.  You must bring fresh hardware best practices into the company, taking them from the initial idea stage all the way through to becoming an accepted part of the culture.
• Expertise is essential in this role.  You will be expected to be a teacher and mentor based on your professional history and many lessons learned from your career.
• You will need excellent soft skills with the ability to prioritize a dynamic list of multiple tasks, grow your network, influence without authority, and communicate effectively at all levels. 

Required experience:

• Proven track record working with large manufacturing operations, demonstrating strong skills with building relationships and securing discretionary efforts from partners with competing priorities.
• Deeply familiar with IPC standards and their application. 
• Skilled with electrical characterization of faults through schematic / datasheet study, multimeters, oscilloscopes, JTAG / boundary scan, and TDR (time domain reflectometry).  Quickly ramp up on the usage of our custom test hardware and software.
• Follow up the electrical characterization with fault isolation, imaging, and chemical analysis.  External labs partners are used, but you should be able to efficiently direct the usage of techniques like 2D/3D X-ray, Dye and Pry, Cross-section, SEM, and EDX.
• Develop and drive to completion the necessary corrective and preventive actions.
• Create new product reliability qualification plans, diagnose failures, and implement lessons learned.
• Help teams create and exercise their ISO 9001 compliant operating procedures.

• Experience with quality project management (facilitating 8D’s), problem solving, communicating, and the quality toolkit is a given, but this should be complemented with hands-on lab experience.
• Existing knowledge of high-speed protocols like PCIe, Ethernet, PAM4, DDR, etc. is preferred, or else rapid self-study will be expected.

The base salary range is $160,000 - $240,000. Your base salary will be determined based on your location, experience, and the pay of employees in similar positions.