Senior Director, Board Product Development Engineering - CA, Santa Clara, United States
Digital Design & SoC Architecture
Originally posted 17 August 2026 by the employer.
About the role
What you'll do
- Guide functional teams in developing cross-boundary techniques before silicon and stackup freeze, focusing on warpage-tolerant DFM and reflow for next-gen BGA pitch.
- Build, lead, and develop a global Board PDE organization across PCB & Fab, SMT/PCBA, and High-Speed Connector & Signal Integrity.
- Set up integration oversight throughout the chip-to-board stack, defining entry and exit requirements at each domain boundary.
- Collaborate with Operations Test Engineering and Signal Integrity to establish test coverage and manufacturing test flow requirements.
- Take charge of reliability and yield performance throughout the stack, investigating excursions to identify root causes and addressing DFx gaps.
What you'll need
- BS in Electrical Engineering, Materials Science, or a related technical field (or equivalent experience).
- 15+ overall years in product, manufacturing, or operations engineering for high-complexity electronics, with 8+ years leading engineering teams and 5+ years leading leaders in a global, cross-matrixed organization.
- A track record of taking complex board and system products from design through NPI to high-volume manufacturing, with clear ownership of schedule, yield, and quality outcomes.
- Comprehensive technical knowledge covering the chip-to-board stack: advanced packaging and flip-chip BGA, high-density and high-layer-count PCB fabrication, SMT and assembly process qualification, and board-level reliability.
- Solid expertise in high-speed signal integrity and manufacturing testing: BERT, channel margining, defining structural and functional test coverage, along with diagnostic and tester board development.
- Demonstrated success building cross-functional processes and sign-off gates that hold up under schedule pressure, with the technical credibility to influence domain owners without owning their qualification.
- Experience collaborating with ODM/CM/OSAT and PCB fab suppliers to qualify new methods before production.
Nice to have
- Full accountability for board manufacturing processes and yields on AI or datacenter platforms at hyperscale.
- Depth in next-gen interconnect and packaging — 112G/224G SerDes correlation, fine-pitch BGA, 2.5D/3D packaging — taken through assembly into HVM at healthy first-pass yield.
- A track record of validating new materials, fabrication technologies, and board manufacturing processes into high-volume manufacturing before the industry standard.
- Proven board-level yield improvement: defect baselines, process-to-yield correlation, and systemic excursions driven to permanent corrective action.
- Success scaling a technical organization from a small core into a global, multi-site team.
Market context
This role has been open 59 days — slightly above the 50-day median for Hardware Systems Engineering roles.
Hardware Systems Engineering · AI ML Hardware
|
Open roles in category
966
|
Median days open
50 d
|
Median salary
$156k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, and who else is hiring
| Metric | NVIDIA | All employers we track in this specialty (966 roles · 102 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 52 | 966 |
| Open roles in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family | 991 | 6157 · 145 employers |
| Median days open | 67 d | 50 d (+17 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $156k |
Who's hiring in this category
- Intel Corporation · 74 open roles · median 35 d
- KLA Corporation · 65 open roles · median 43 d
- Teradyne · 57 open roles · median 29 d
- NVIDIA (this employer) · 52 open roles · median 67 d
- Applied Materials · 50 open roles · median 65 d
- AMD · 47 open roles · median 49 d
How we counted: 966 open Hardware Systems Engineering (AI ML Hardware) roles from 102 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 17 Oct 2026. Specialty figures count only roles carrying this exact specialty label, so an employer's related work in neighbouring specialties is not included there — it is counted in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family row. Figures refresh nightly.