Chief Technical Strategist

Organization & Role

In this role you will identify and champion technical and market concepts that will drive increased competitiveness into Teradyne’s instrumentation products over the next 5-10 years.  You will be the bridge between Marketing and Engineering functions, internalizing Market needs and Technical possibilities at a sufficiently detailed level to make high quality recommendations to materially enhance Teradyne’s strategic competitiveness.  You will analyze target market areas deemed to be under competitive threat, or experiencing rapid growth or disruption, and propose a broad range of solution(s) to improve Teradyne’s strategic competitive positioning.  The solution space is anticipated to be technically focused – architectural improvements, custom silicon, and proposed enabling technology project(s) – typically based on founding Market insight and/or conjecture, and may also include broader topics including business practices and development process.

Target market area, time frame, and scope of the solution(s) are such that they complement existing development efforts, enhancing organizational efficiency and enabling collaboration of the groups involved.  

This role will be part “technologist” - understanding technical industry trends, investigating emerging technologies, and part “strategist” - proposing how these technologies should best interact with Teradyne’s strategic instrumentation needs. This role is executed with a wide degree of autonomy - you are the principal driving resource armed with a balanced comprehensive view of Market need, technical understanding, and organizational capabilities.

When a sufficiently compelling opportunity is identified, this role may transition into a more focused “visionary and technical lead” role.  In this phase, you will focus on a single project, and perform whatever role(s) are required to move forward - organizational advocate, identifying the needed feasibility analysis, determining the personnel and/or collaborations required, and working on whatever details are required to move the vision forward.  Given that you have no direct reports, and that the Engineering organization is fully utilized executing approved projects, moving forward may require identification and management of contractors and external collaboration(s) to proceed.

You will report directly to the VP of Engineering and VP of Marketing in a dual reporting structure.  This role’s focus is fundamentally determined by consensus between Marketing and Engineering functions.  This role is empowered to understand the detailed Market need and challenge Teradyne’s understanding of such.  This role is empowered to directly drive Engineering resources.  This reporting is consistent with the positional authority that is required to enable success in this role.  

Responsibilities

This time spent on this role is expected to break down roughly into these percentages.  At any given time this role will be primarily focused in just one of these areas, but average out over a long period of time.

 

 25%  Technologist 

Understanding what technologies and process capabilities are  available, identifying promising emerging technology, etc

 15%  PLA Changes

Understanding and synthesizing the technical and marketing challenges of the given PLA

5% Hypothesis Generation/Validation

Given available technologies, and PLA challenges, define the best path(s) forward. Include practical considerations such as organizational capabilities and staffing constraints

35% Organizational Advocate 

Given rough agreement on the path forward, make it actionable. Make the case, improve it to reach consensus, work with each relevant function to address fundamental concerns, report on progress and challenges

20% Technical Lead

Given rough agreement on the path forward, make it actionable. Make the case, improve it to reach consensus, work with each relevant function to address fundamental concerns, report on progress and challenges.

 

Basic Qualifications & Skills

• The ideal candidate will have a broad set of interests, experience, and skills. 
• Aptitude to see big and little picture, and contribute to both
• Demonstrated capability to communicate the vision at a broad level of abstraction to support market-level tradeoffs, and at the detailed level required to make it actionable by Engineerin