Senior Storage Architect - San Jose, United States
Originally posted 15 July 2026 by the employer.
About the role
Western Digital's Customer Technical Sales & Support team is seeking a Senior Storage Architect to serve as the primary technical bridge between engineering and enterprise customers, hyperscalers, and OEM partners. The role focuses on evaluating how customers utilize HDDs across storage system software and hardware architectures to guide internal design reviews and roadmap planning.
What you'll do
- Analyze storage system software and hardware architectures in the data center, evaluating trade-offs across protocol, performance, reliability, and cost. - Lead pre-sales and post-sales technical engagements with enterprise customers and OEM partners, including design reviews, proof-of-concept builds, and performance validation to ensure HDD products meet workload requirements. - Represent customer technical perspectives in internal design reviews across firmware, software, and hardware teams. - Author technical documentation such as architecture white papers, integration guides, and application notes. - Translate customer deployment challenges into actionable architecture requirements and structured input for firmware roadmap planning cycles. - Educate technical sales and broader engineering teams on storage applications and systems architectures.
What you'll need
- Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or Computer Science. - 8–15 years of experience in storage architecture, systems engineering, or a closely related field, with ownership of end-to-end storage system design through production deployment. - Demonstrated experience defining and owning storage architecture specifications. - Proven cross-functional collaboration with engineering teams across multiple product programs. - Demonstrated ability to present architecture decisions, trade-off rationale, and technical recommendations to customer engineering teams and executive stakeholders.
Nice to have
- Master's or PhD in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or a related field. - Expertise with data center and hyperscaler storage workflows, applications, and deployment environments. - Knowledge of storage technologies and the trade-offs in using them across various storage solutions. - Prior customer-facing or solutions architecture experience in field applications or solutions engineering.
Skills: storage system software and hardware architectures, data center, HDD products, customer workload requirements, architecture specifications