Sr. Director, Intelligent Platforms

Company Description

At WD, our vision is to power global innovation and push the boundaries of technology to make what you thought was once impossible, possible.

At our core, WD is a company of problem solvers. People achieve extraordinary things given the right technology. For decades, we’ve been doing just that—our technology helped people put a man on the moon and capture the first-ever picture of a black hole.

We offer an expansive portfolio of technologies, HDDs, and platforms for business, creative professionals, and consumers alike under our Western Digital®, WD®, and WD_BLACK™.

We are a key partner to some of the largest and highest-growth organizations in the world. From enabling systems to make cities safer and more connected, to powering the data centers behind many of the world’s biggest companies and hyperscale cloud providers, to meeting the massive and ever-growing data storage needs of the AI era, WD is fueling a brighter, smarter future.

Today’s exceptional challenges require your unique skills. Together, we can build the future of data storage.

Job Description

We are seeking a Principal Architect, Intelligent Platforms to help shape the technical architecture for a next generation platform strategy that unlocks the full value of intelligent storage infrastructure. This leader will support the development of a platform architecture that begins with HDD, extends to flash, and evolves across future storage tiers through a consistent, scalable, and developer friendly API foundation.

The ideal candidate brings deep systems architecture expertise across storage, distributed systems, software platforms, and APIs. This person will work across product, engineering, research, and business teams to help translate strategic goals into a durable technical architecture, clear design principles, and an executable roadmap.

This is a high impact role for a senior technical leader who can think strategically, go deep technically, and align diverse stakeholders around a bold platform vision.

Essential Duties & Responsibilities

1. Support the definition and evolution of the architecture for Intelligent Platforms across device, software, and network interface layers.
2. Partner with product management, engineering, and fellow architects to shape a scalable API and platform architecture that emphasizes consistency, extensibility, and long term value.
3. Provide architectural guidance and technical leadership on key design decisions, tradeoffs, and integration points across HDD, flash, and future storage tiers.
4. Contribute to architectural reviews, technical standards, and design principles that help ensure coherence across teams and releases.
5. Represent the architecture in cross functional discussions with internal stakeholders, partners, and customers, helping connect strategic goals with technical direction.

Qualifications

Required:

1. Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field.
2. 10+ years of experience in systems architecture, platform software, storage systems, distributed systems, or related infrastructure domains.
3. Proven experience contributing to the architecture of large scale platforms, infrastructure software, or storage products.
4. Strong background in APIs, software architecture, and system level design for complex products.
5. Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to influence across engineering, product, and leadership teams.

Preferred:

1. Advanced degree in a relevant technical field.
2. Experience with storage technologies such as HDD, SSD, object storage, block storage, file storage, or distributed storage.
3. Familiarity with hyperscale infrastructure patterns, internal platform APIs, or cloud scale services.
4. Experience supporting architectural decisions across both hardware and software domains.
5. Familiarity with AI and data intensive workloads and the infrastructure needs that support them.

Additional Information

WD is committed to providing equal opportunities to all applicants and employees and will not discriminate against any applicant or employee based on their race, color, ancestry, religion (including religious dress and grooming standards), sex (including pregnancy, childbirth or related medical conditions, breastfeeding or related medical conditions), gender (including a person’s gender identity, gender expression, and gender-related appearance and behavior, whether or not stereotypically associated with the person’s assigned sex at birth), age, national origin, sexual orientation, medical condition, marital status (including domestic partnership status), physical disabil