Job Description

Job Description

Western Digital is looking for a Principal Mechanical Engineer responsible for design and analysis of high performance storage systems and subsystems for the OEM and data center marketplace with specific focus on product design and production engineering; work to develop products that are robust in their ability to withstand shock, vibration, thermal, and other environmental challenges when deployed to a field environment. Apply design knowledge of plastic injection molded parts as well as sheet metal parts with part designs integrated into larger sub-assembly and assembly systems fully modeled in SolidWorks.

The Principal Mechanical Engineer will be a lead resource to the Mechanical Engineer program team lead for the mechanical development and production engineering of datacenter storage systems and subsystems consisting of hard drives, solid state drives, fans, power supplies, electronics with high speed communication interfaces and rack-based hardware.

Due to the complex interrelationships of these systems, the candidate will need to hold broad mechanical engineering expertise including Finite Element Analysis (FEA), the ability to design or redesign for the system to meet specific shock and vibration criteria, utilize and apply tolerance analysis methodologies.

Other areas of design focus may be thermal design and analysis, electromagnetic interference mitigation and acoustics.

The engineer may be an individual or lead contributor on multiple programs and will direct/lead the work of others.

In addition to a broad background across many facets of mechanical engineering, the candidate must possess strong analytical skills and be a creative “out of the box” thinker.

ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES: 

In this role, the engineer will support the functional (Mechanical Engineer) project representative for areas of mechanical design and analysis/study in addition to collaborating on designs of peers working alongside you as part of the development or production engineering team.
Additionally, you will lead/participate in design reviews, be accountable for tracking schedules, issues and resolutions, and work with domestic and international suppliers and manufacturing locations.
Acting as a lead engineer, the candidate will be responsible for the development and execution of test plans culminating in test reports demonstrating the design integrity for your areas of expertise and responsibility.
Each project team consists of cross-functional engineers with electrical, mechanical, firmware and manufacturing backgrounds at a minimum.
In this position, you will mentor and build the skills of less senior engineers.
Candidate designs and analyzes mechanical systems in both the theoretical and empirical realm, influences packaging design and uses the engineering change management system to formally release design content into Agile.
Conducts feasibility studies and testing on new and modified designs. Directs support personnel in the preparation of detailed design, design testing and prototype fabrication.
Provides design information to packaging engineering for packaging documentation. Apply present knowledge or learn and utilize tools such as JIRA, Agile and Microsoft Office products.
This is a senior-level position for the right individual with superior creative design and technical skills, good project management abilities, and an enthusiasm for success as well as extensive experience in use of SolidWorks.

Qualifications

REQUIRED: 

BSME or MSME degree with minimum of 8+ years product development experience in computing, storage or related fields.
Expert working knowledge of CAD systems (SolidWorks preferred) required.
Working knowledge of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and/or finite element analysis (FEA) is desired. Experience with multiple analysis programs is a plus.
Experience in structural, vibrational, thermal and acoustic modeling and problem resolution a plus.
Shall be familiar with test instrumentation such as accelerometers, force gauges, air flow and thermal test equipment and structural dynamic analyzers.

SKILLS:

Demonstrated ability in creative problem solving and innovation.
Highly proficient in writing part and assembly test plans with subsequent execution to the plan and generation of both test plans and test reports thereby validating the design of parts, assemblies and systems.
Experience in successfully managing (engineering portion) development projects from design to production.
Excellent project management and communication skills are required.
Solid understanding of manufacturing technologies and methodologies.
Extensive knowledge and use of Microsoft Office products (Word, Excel, Power Point, MSTeams, OneNote) and Adobe products.
Strong experimental and analytical skills such as:

A desire to understand why a design was selected and how to test to demonstrate successful functionality (or lack thereof)
The ability to distill large amounts of experimental data to a meaningful conclusion