Senior Staff Engineer - Advanced Process Development

About the Company

Level: Senior Staff Engineer (Senior Individual Contributor role; no direct reports)

The HGA Process Development team owns early stage process invention, feasibility, and KPIV understanding to enable future product requirements. The team builds deep, physics based process knowledge, focusing on identifying critical KPIVs, defining their relationships to KPOVs, and delivering validated, tool ready concepts. Working closely with HGA/TGA design and product teams, the group ensures alignment to next generation architectures while influencing process capability and design tradeoffs. Operating upstream of integration and factory organizations, the team emphasizes rapid learning, concept validation, and technical risk reduction. Development is strongly engineering driven, with focus on process physics, materials behavior, and reliability, supported by analytical tools such as modeling and FEA.

Responsibilities

• Lead, guide and consult the Advanced HGA Process Development technical team.
• Own the technical direction and execution of early development, ensuring strong pipeline of innovative concepts and effective down selection based on technical merit and scalability.
• Oversee the metrology strategy and modeling roadmap, ensuring technical alignment with product requirements and process physics, including slider attachment, HDD head interconnect technologies, and proper metrology and modeling.
• Champion and institutionalize a KPIV/KPOV engineering discipline, fostering a data-driven culture and structured decision-making process across the technical organization.
• Seek tool concept development and equipment strategy, working with internal teams and external suppliers to enable first-of-kind process and automation solutions.
• Partner closely with U.S.-based design, materials, and product teams to align process development with future architecture needs, including regular cross time zone collaboration.
• Define and lead the transition of validated concepts to integration teams, providing clear process windows, scaling strategies, and technical risk documentation to ensure operational readiness.
• Foster a culture of innovation, accountability, and technical excellence through active technical mentorship and coaching, balancing speed, rigor, and creativity in early-stage development.

Qualifications

• Proven experience in engineering knowledge, ideally in material science, or advanced process development.
• Strong background in material, nano-material, metal or metal-composite type material, deep research project experience, with ability to guide complex, multidisciplinary technical work.
• Experience leading technical teams in ambiguous, early stage development environments, driving from concept to validated solutions.
• Solid understanding of data driven engineering approaches, including structured problem solving and statistical thinking.
• Ability to collaborate effectively across global teams, influencing design, materials, and product decisions.

Benefits

• Teparuk Thailand site with on-site canteen and coffee shop (24/7), running track, gymnasium and fitness center, sports activities, music/dance/aerobic classes, green areas, employee resource groups (e.g., SWLN, PRIDE, parents and caregivers), on-site festivals and community activities.

Additional Information

Location: Teparuk, Thailand. Home to over 4,000 employees, the Teparuk site specializes in producing nano-recording heads—a crucial component for the read/write functionality of hard disk drives.