Western Digital is seeking a Staff Technologist within the Customer Technical Sales & Support (CTS) organization to support strategic cloud and hyperscaler customers. In this individual contributor position, you will serve as a technical bridge between WD Engineering and customer teams, guiding engagements from early evaluation through production support while driving cross-team issue resolution.
Role Overview
This Staff Technologist role owns deep understanding of customer storage architectures, qualification requirements, deployment models, and field issues. You will lead technical engagements, translate customer needs into actionable inputs for product and engineering roadmaps, and represent customer technical priorities in internal engineering and product discussions.
Key Responsibilities
- Lead technical support and engagement activities for cloud and hyperscaler accounts.
- Apply knowledge of customer architectures, workloads, and storage deployment requirements.
- Drive product qualification, system integration, validation, and issue resolution.
- Represent customer technical priorities within internal engineering and product discussions.
- Track field quality and integration metrics and conduct customer technical reviews.
- Develop technical documentation to support faster adoption of new WD technologies.
- Provide expert technical input during cross-functional discussions covering customer readiness, product fit, and future opportunity areas.
Required Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or a related technical field.
- Significant hands-on experience in storage systems, HDDs, server/storage platforms, or data center infrastructure, with a senior profile indicated by roughly 5+ years of directly relevant experience.
- Strong understanding of storage system architecture, server/storage integration, and customer deployment models in cloud or hyperscale environments.
- Experience working directly with customers in field applications, systems architecture, customer engineering, or technical support roles.
- Ability to debug technical issues across hardware, firmware, software, and system interactions.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills, including presenting technical material to engineers and executive stakeholders.
Compensation & Work Location
- Location: San Jose, CA (onsite)
- Salary: USD 115,200 - 153,600 per year
Pay position within the posted range may depend on factors such as education, qualifications, certifications and experience; job skills and knowledge; performance and results; geographic location; shift; internal and external equity; and business needs. The posted range reflects possible compensation for roles performed in California, Colorado, New York, or remote roles that can be performed in California, Colorado, and New York.
Benefits
- Paid vacation time and paid sick leave
- Medical/dental/vision insurance
- Life, accident and disability insurance
- Tax-advantaged flexible spending and health savings accounts
- Employee assistance program
- Supplemental life and AD&D
- Legal plan
- Pet insurance
- Critical illness; accident and hospital indemnity
- Tuition reimbursement
- Transit
- The Applause Program
- Employee stock purchase plan
- WD Savings 401(k) Plan
- Eligibility for bonuses under either WD’s Short Term Incentive Plan (STI Plan) or the Sales Incentive Plan (SIP)
- May be eligible to participate in an annual Long-Term Incentive (LTI) program (RSUs or cash equivalents)
Additional Compensation Details
Bonus, commission, benefits, and other compensation elements are allocated at the Company’s sole discretion unless and until paid, and may be modified at the Company’s sole discretion consistent with applicable law. Not all roles are eligible to participate in the LTI program, and not all roles are eligible for equity under the LTI plan.
Candidate Notice
- WD and its subsidiaries will never request payment as a condition for applying for a position or receiving an offer of employment.
- If you encounter any such request, report it immediately to the WD Ethics Helpline or email compliance@wdc.com.
