Senior Technologist - Applications Engineering

Company Description

At Western Digital, 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, Western Digital 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.

We are a key partner to some of the largest and highest growth organizations in the world. From energizing the most competitive gaming platforms, to enabling systems to make cities safer and cars smarter and more connected, to powering the data centers behind many of the world’s biggest companies and public cloud, Western Digital is fueling a brighter, smarter future.

Binge-watch any shows, use social media or shop online lately? You’ll find Western Digital supporting the storage infrastructure behind many of these platforms. And, that flash memory card that captures and preserves your most precious moments? That’s us, too.

We offer an expansive portfolio of technologies, storage devices and platforms for business and consumers alike. Our data-centric solutions are comprised of the Western Digital®, G-Technology™, SanDisk® and WD® brands.

Today’s exceptional challenges require your unique skills. It’s You & Western Digital. Together, we’re the next BIG thing in data.

Job Description

The Western Digital Platforms Group offers data center ready, next-generation disaggregated storage platforms via our Ultrastar Data, Ultrastar Edge, OpenFlex and RapidFlex portfolios.

One particular focus is helping customers simplify NVMe/NVMe-oF storage deployment, with our enhanced OpenFlex Data24 3200 NVMe-oF JBOF/Storage platform, along with the next-gen RapidFlex A2000 and C2000 NVMe-oF fabric bridge devices (FBDs). These storage solutions are enabling an ecosystem, whilst providing more flexibility and choice for simplifying NVMe and NVMe-oF deployments. Western Digital is currently the only company with vertical integration capabilities targeting both ends of the Ethernet wire to deliver solutions where data travels from the server initiator to the storage target.

In an era where AI/ML is emerging as the most impactful technology in decades, data centers are seeing new class of power and performance hungry GPU AI servers being introduced. This growing demand will require vendors to pivot their solutions to address the challenges presented with such scale; be it in compute, storage, power, cooling and networking. Western Digital’s architectural approach to agnostic storage disaggregation and native ethernet ecosystems allows us to sit at the forefront in addressing these rapidly evolving data center requirements.

Within the Western Digital Platforms BU, the Applications Engineering team’s charter is to provide systems, performance, application, and solutions engineering expertise to help drive product development, product awareness, sales enablement, and end customer solution development / implementation.

ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES 

• Enjoy a diverse set of responsibilities and challenges. Fundamentally you will support our Platforms portfolio by providing advanced technical subject matter expertise and thought leadership and in turn, contribute to the shaping of the technical and business strategy of the Platforms BU.
• Evangelize product at industry events, trade shows, seminars, and customer briefings.
• Forge close collaboration with our technical and strategic partners, professional networks, and customers whilst coordinating internal teams in support of business objectives.
• Provide guidance and best practices to sales teams and help refine sales strategy and tactics.
• Possess extensive experience and detailed knowledge of common industry storage applications (e.g. scale-out filesystems, databases, object storage, hypervisors, composability frameworks), as well as distributed storage and deployment architectures.
• You will understand the latest technological advancements in the enterprise storage space and bring an in-depth understanding of system architectures and high-speed communications interface protocols such as SAS and NVMe-oF (RoCE and TCP) along with their supporting technologies.
• Ideally you will have applied experience with GPU architectures such as NVIDIA CUDA and GPUDirect Storage including associated benchmarking tools (such as MLPerf).
• Act as a subject matter expert for new composable infrastructure products and educate customers and partners on differentiating product technologies.
• Assist sales team members in advancing and closing individual opportunities and take ownership of technical responsibilities within customer engagements.
• Assist customers with evaluations, benchmarks, system configurations, and system installations.
• Provide feedb