Senior Manager, Servo Firmware Engineering

About the role

Senior Manager, Servo Firmware Engineering Location: San Jose, CA or Irvine, CA,

About the Role

We are seeking an experienced Senior Manager to join our organization in San Jose, CA or Irvine, CA, United States. In this role, you will lead the US HDD servo firmware development team responsible for the strategic vision and execution of the servo subsystem firmware architecture to enable next-generation HDD products with multiple concurrent data streams and multi-actuator control. You will be accountable for defining a coherent, scalable platform strategy that balances technical feasibility with economic viability across program schedules, power envelopes, and cost constraints.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities

• Collaborate with cross-functional stakeholders - including SoC architecture, recording systems, and manufacturing teams - to define and implement HDD servo firmware encompassing real-time motion control, parameter management, microarchitecture, instruction set architecture, and associated toolchains.
• Facilitate and participate in team meetings and lead firmware and associated tooling development, maintaining clear and sufficient communication for a geographically distributed international development team to support business and technical objectives.
• Define hardware, firmware, and associated tools designs together with stakeholders and development teams.
• Negotiate with stakeholders on priority and ensure strong execution of identified hardware, firmware, and associated tools strategy.
• Enable definition and maintenance of a future-state servo real-time control firmware architecture that scales from single to multiple concurrent data streams and supports concurrent control of multiple actuators and heads.
• Coordinate SoC microarchitecture decisions affecting servo compute, including core count, memory hierarchy, interconnect design, and dynamic control accelerators, ensuring that FPGA prototype work and accelerator designs map cleanly into production-ready firmware and tools models.
• Own servo compute resource management and budgeting, including instruction and data memory allocation, processor cycle limits, and regression thresholds; drive adherence through continuous integration practices to prevent late-stage resource conflicts.
• Lead the co-design of firmware platform architecture, including core control-loop implementations, multi-cluster and multi-actuator orchestration, and cross-generation stability, ensuring deterministic real-time performance across multiple SoC generations.
• Drive the evolution of the servo firmware tools ecosystem to support multi-cluster, multi-stream characterization and debugging.
• Coordinate across geographically distributed teams - including servo firmware, SoC architecture and design, recording subsystem and algorithms, servo tools, manufacturing firmware, and test - to align platform decisions with program risk, schedules, yield, and customer experience objectives.
• Deliver major multi-stream and multi-actuator capabilities that meet control performance and power targets on new SoC generations.
• Communicate technical concepts, architectural trade-offs, and strategic recommendations to senior management and cross-functional stakeholders, providing architectural guidance throughout the product development lifecycle.

Qualifications & Requirements

Required

• Bachelor's degree in computer engineering, electrical engineering, computer science, or equivalent degree and professional experience.
• 10+ years of professional experience in embedded architecture and development, with a specific focus on real-time control, storage technology, or related servo control applications.
• 5+ years of experience in senior technical leadership roles, demonstrating strong leadership and a consistent commitment to delivering results.
• Proficiency in digital signal processing and real-time systems development.
• Demonstrated experience with FPGA and/or ASIC design for embedded applications.
• Preferred
• Master's degree or relevant professional certification (e.g., embedded systems, real-time architecture).
• PhD or specialist certification with demonstrated expertise in real-time, multi-core computing platform architecture.
• Proficiency in servo control theory, including loop design, stability analysis, and performance optimization
• Skills
• Proficiency in C/C++ programming, including compiler toolchain awareness.
• Familiarity with MATLAB, Simulink, and other modeling and simulation tools such as Renode.
• Solid understanding of hardware-software co-design and system-level integration.
• Proven ability to lead cross-functional engineering teams across geographically distributed locations and manage complex technical projects.
• Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills with meticulous attention to detail.
• Excellent communication, interpersonal, and collaborative skills, including strong presentation abilities, with demonstrated capability to work effectively across worldwide engineering teams in English.
• Experience with product development lifecycle and design-for-manufacturability principles.
• Familiarity with industry standards and best practices in storage technology.
• Ability to work effectively in a fast-paced, collaborative environment.

Additional Information

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Based on our experience, we anticipate that the application deadline will be 08/04/2026, although we reserve the right to close the application process sooner if we hire an applicant for this position before the application deadline. If we are not able to hire someone from this role before the application deadline, we will update this posting with a new anticipated application deadline.

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Compensation & Benefits Details

• An employee's pay position within the salary range may be based on several factors including but not limited to (1) relevant education; qualifications; certifications; and experience; (2) skills, ability, knowledge of the job; (3) performance, contribution and results; (4) geographic location; (5) shift; (6) internal and external equity; and (7) business and organizational needs.
• The salary range is what we believe to be the range of possible compensation for this role at the time of this posting. We may ultimately pay more or less than the posted range and this range is only applicable for jobs to be performed in California, Colorado, New York or remote jobs that can be performed in California, Colorado and New York. This range may be modified in the future.
• If your position is non-exempt, you are eligible for overtime pay pursuant to company policy and applicable laws. You may also be eligible for shift differential pay, depending on the shift to which you are assigned.
• You will be eligible to be considered for bonuses under either WD's Short Term Incentive Plan ("STI Plan") or the Sales Incentive Plan ("SIP") which provides incentive awards based on Company and individual performance, depending on your role and your performance. You may be eligible to participate in our annual Long-Term Incentive (LTI) program, which consists of restricted stock units (RSUs) or cash equivalents, pursuant to the terms of the LTI plan. Please note that not all roles are eligible to participate in the LTI program, and not all roles are eligible for equity under the LTI plan. RSU awards are also available to eligible new hires, subject to WD's Standard Terms and Conditions for Restricted Stock Unit Awards.
• We offer a comprehensive package of benefits including paid vacation time; paid sick leave; medical/dental/vision insurance; life, accident and disability insurance; tax-advantaged flexible spending and health savings accounts; employee assistance program; other voluntary benefit programs such as 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; and the WD Savings 401(k) Plan.
• Note: No amount of pay is considered to be wages or compensation until such amount is earned, vested, and determinable. The amount and availability of any bonus, commission, benefits, or any other form of compensation and benefits that are allocable to a particular employee remains in the Company's sole discretion unless and until paid and may be modified at the Company's sole discretion, consistent with the law.

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