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 role, you will serve as a technical link between Western Digital Engineering and customer teams, leading engagements from early evaluation through production support while driving resolution across stakeholders.
Role Overview
This position supports customers with a deep focus on storage architectures, qualification needs, deployment models, and field issues. The role also translates customer technical priorities into actionable inputs for product and engineering roadmaps. You will influence technical discussions across Sales, Engineering, Product Management, and Quality, while maintaining ownership of technical understanding for customer environments.
Key Responsibilities
- Lead technical support and customer engagement for cloud and hyperscaler accounts.
- Understand customer architectures, workloads, and storage deployment requirements.
- Drive product qualification, system integration, validation, and issue resolution.
- Represent customer technical priorities in internal engineering and product discussions.
- Track field quality and integration metrics and lead customer technical reviews.
- Develop technical documentation to help enable faster adoption of new WD technologies.
- Provide expert technical perspective in cross-functional discussions on 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 the CTS/architect postings indicating a senior profile (approximately 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 a field applications, systems architecture, customer engineering, or technical support capacity.
- Ability to debug technical issues across hardware, firmware, software, and system interactions.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to present technical material to engineers and executive stakeholders.
Compensation and Location
- Location: San Jose, CA (onsite)
- Salary range: USD 115,200 - 153,600 per year
The final pay position within the salary range may depend on factors including relevant education, qualifications and certifications, experience, skills and knowledge, performance and results, geographic location, shift, internal and external equity, and business and organizational needs. Western Digital may pay more or less than the posted range, and the range applies to roles performed in California, Colorado, New York, or remote roles that can be performed in California, Colorado, and New York.
If the position is non-exempt, the candidate may be eligible for overtime pay under company policy and applicable laws. Depending on assigned shift, shift differential pay may also apply.
Benefits
- 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
- 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
Candidates may also be eligible for bonuses under either Western Digital’s Short Term Incentive (STI Plan) or Sales Incentive Plan (SIP). Participation in an annual Long-Term Incentive (LTI) program (RSUs or cash equivalents) may be possible, subject to role eligibility. Western Digital also notes that not all roles are eligible for LTI participation and not all roles are eligible for equity under the LTI plan.
Additional Notes
Western Digital states that no amount of pay is considered wages or compensation until earned, vested, and determinable. Bonus, commission, benefits, and other forms of compensation remain in the Company’s sole discretion unless and until paid, and may be modified at the Company’s sole discretion consistent with the law.
Candidate Notice
- Western Digital and its subsidiaries will never request payment as a condition for applying for a position or receiving an offer.
- If any such requests are encountered, report them to the WD Ethics Helpline or email compliance@wdc.com.
