Senior PCB / Hardware Quality Engineer - Astera Labs

As an Astera Labs PCB & Hardware Quality Engineer, you will establish yourself as the quality champion responsible for hardware quality management to the world’s leading cloud service providers. 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 5 years’ quality engineering experience including customer returns, failure analysis, 8D report generation, supplier management, and improving product development processes.
• 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. 
• Be prepared to build new engineering processes for the organization from the ground up and be the sole subject matter expert.  You will be expected to bring new best practices into the company, taking them from the initial idea stage all the way through them becoming an accepted part of the culture.

Required experience:

• Proven track record working with large manufacturing (ODM/OEM) partners, demonstrating excellent skills with customer relationship management.
• 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 electrical characterization with fault isolation, imaging, and chemical analysis.  Use 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.

 Preferred experience:

• Preference given to candidates with experience being embedded with new product development R&D teams versus those coming from contract manufacturers.
• 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.
• Python programming.  Atlassian toolkit (Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket).  Agile PLM.  CAD layout Tools.
• Knowledge of high-speed protocols like PCIe, Ethernet, PAM4, DDR, etc. 
• Finite Element Analysis (FEA) such as Ansys, Abaqus, Solidworks or Hypermesh.