Applications Engineer (Qual Product)

ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES:

AE, Applications Engineer in HDD works as the focal point of contact for OEM customers in Surveillance, Connected Home and NAS applications as well as for WDC internal Engineering and Marketing teams to manage qualification plans and drive actions to align Product specification and designs with Customer's requirements.

AE is responsible to track all technical and design requirements from OEM customer, and ensure those are reviewed by the relevant team and incorporated into product design in timely manner, which occasionally requires in-depth discussion and negotiation with Customer and/or Engineer team.
Coordination of such discussions is owned by AE as well.

AE manages all qualification activities, starting from specification alignment, qualification sample forecasting and tracking of them, open issue tracking (FA and Engineering discussion) and drives actions to closures.
Leading discussions with FE (Field Engineer) for OEM customer product design and requirements is another key role for AE, which requires relationship building with key customer stakeholders.

AE is accountable to deliver all qualification deliverables including but not limited to Qual reports, any product information required by Customer, FA report during qualification if there are any issues.  AE will have BOM management, factory process, technical reference manual as well as customer label release responsibility. 
Before a new product qualification cycle starts, AE starts to work with relevant internal and external teams to prepare such deliverables ahead of time.