Staff Engineer, RMA

Originally posted 10 September 2026 by the employer.

Advance product quality as a Staff Engineer, RMA in Qualcomm's Customer Quality Team.

About the role

As a Staff Engineer, RMA, you will resolve product quality issues associated with Return Merchandise Authorization (RMA) requests by performing system- and device-level evaluations.

What you'll do

• Lead major customer issues to resolution, reducing occurrences of No Fault Found, EOS, ESD, Mechanical damage, and SMT Reflow.
• Conduct technical evaluations of customer returned devices using tools such as ATE, XRAY, CSAM, IV curve analysis, and bench testing to determine root cause.
• Act as the conduit between Qualcomm's customer, Product Core Team, and Branch CQE, and improve processes as needed.
• Track actions, schedules, and owners to maintain targeted RMA analysis cycle time and initiate internal corrective actions.
• Drive improvement of internal quality systems to reduce outgoing product quality DPPM.
• Update customers in a timely fashion regarding the status of open quality issues or support requests.

What you'll need

• Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Material Science, Computer Science, or a related field and 4+ years of Reliability Engineering experience.
• Experience in a technical leadership role.
• Experience with digital SoC products, semiconductor technologies, and system-level debugging.
• Experience analyzing and debugging customer issues involving application processors, CPUs, GPUs, DSPs, AI/NPU subsystems, memory, power management, and modem technologies (e.g., LTE, WCDMA, CDMA, GSM).
• Experience in microelectronics, SMT processes, semiconductor fabrication, assembly, and product quality engineering.
• Strong experience with quality methodologies, statistical analysis, root-cause investigation, and structured problem-solving techniques.

Nice to have

• Strong understanding of Digital SoC architecture, including CPU, GPU, DSP, NPU/AI accelerators, cache hierarchy, memory subsystems, interconnects, power management, and clocking architectures.
• Experience debugging complex SoC-level failures, including boot issues, system hangs, crashes, performance degradation, thermal events, and power-related failures.
• Strong knowledge of silicon debug methodologies, failure analysis, fault isolation, and root cause determination for digital semiconductor products.
• Experience with hardware/software interaction, including firmware, bootloaders, operating systems, device drivers, and application-level debugging.
• Familiarity with power management features such as DVFS, CPR, low-power modes, voltage scaling, and thermal management.
• Experience analyzing customer-reported issues involving CPU, GPU, DSP, AI/NPU, memory (DDR/LPDDR), storage, display, camera, audio, connectivity, and modem subsystems.
• Working knowledge of semiconductor manufacturing, assembly, package reliability, SMT processes, and failure mechanisms such as EOS, ESD, latch-up, and mechanical damage.
• Experience using debug and characterization tools such as ATE, JTAG, scan diagnostics, logic analyzers, oscilloscopes, protocol analyzers, X-ray, CSAM, IV curve tracing, and FA tools.
• Strong understanding of silicon validation, product qualification, yield analysis, reliability testing, and customer-return failure analysis methodologies.
• Proven ability to lead cross-functional debug efforts involving Design, Product Test Engineering, Failure Analysis, Manufacturing, Reliability, System Engineering, and Software teams.
• Strong understanding of smartphone and embedded system architectures, including application processors, memory subsystems, power delivery networks, display, camera, audio, storage, and connectivity functions.
• Ability to correlate customer-reported failure symptoms with underlying SoC, hardware, software, or manufacturing-related root causes.
• Experience with Android-based systems, system logs, crash analysis, kernel debugging, and performance characterization.

Skills: RMA, technical evaluations, root cause, ATE, XRAY, CSAM, IV curve, silicon debug