China – System Characterization Engineer

As a System Characterization engineer, you will join the team responsible for the characterization of customer systems within the quality organization.  A key aspect of this role is the identification of dynamics and vibration of customer systems that contribute to loss of performance and reliability, using measured results to formulate solutions for both internal and external customers. This role works closely with China‑based customers to ensure successful HDD qualification, debug complex system‑level issues, and drive improvements into product design and validation. 

1. Responsible for collection and analysis data for HDDs in customer systems, correlating results to performance degradation or latency increase to environmental factors.  Collaborate with Engineering Servo and mechanical team to assess the impact of vibration from chassis on performance metrics such as command throughput and latency.
2. Use HDD and laboratory tools to make vibration and acoustics measurements to characterize customer systems and compare against baselines established by the design engineering as well as Manufacturing data. 
3. Identify causes of vibration-related failures on customer and qualification drives, especially those related to performance degradation.  Support team in finding improvements for those failures, especially through tradeoffs with the engineering, manufacturing, and customer support teams.
4. Pro-actively engage with subject matter experts in Engineering (servo, mechanical, RSS), Customer Technical Support and Quality teams on customer and qualification issues and during cross-functional failure analysis task forces.
5. Summarize findings and present information, ideas, and your perspective to peers, team members, and managers.
6. Interact with Development teams to understand new features related to op-vibration mitigation, develop associated failure analysis tools, processes, and documentation.
7. Develop, improve, and document analysis, procedures, tool, and process improvements to expedite future characterization of systems.
8. Travel within China and occasional international travel may be required to support customer engagements and joint investigations.

1. Knowledge of experimental measurement techniques and experience using lab equipment. such as accelerometers, microphones, data acquisition software and oscilloscopes.
2. Detailed knowledge of Hard Drives and storage applications.
3. Familiarity with SAS/SATA protocol.
4. Experience with servers and server testing and multiple OS (Linux, Windows).
5. Strong written and verbal English communication skills; Mandarin required for customer engagement.
6. Excellent working knowledge of MATLAB, statistics and signal processing.
7. Proven application of applying technical skills to problem solving.
8. Previous experience supporting China‑based cloud/enterprise customers (Alibaba, Tencent, Huawei, Baidu, ByteDance, OEM/ODMs).
9. Knowledge and experience with Data Analytics and Reliability is a plus.
10. Excellent interpersonal and teamworking skills

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