Senior Storage Architect

Job Description

The Customer Technical Sales & Support team at Western Digital is the primary technical bridge between WD's Engineering and our enterprise customers, hyperscalers, and OEM partners. As a Storage Architect on this team, you own the understanding our customer’s architecture and how they utilize HDDs to delivery solutions to their end customers to provide input to our Engineering teams to improve our products or propose new opportunities for WD. You bring 7–10 years of hands-on storage system experience, an informed perspective on where the industry is heading, and the ability to communicate to other engineers and the executive team. This is a senior individual contributor role with significant cross-functional influence across firmware, software, hardware, and product management.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities

• Understand storage system software and hardware architectures in the data center and the trade offs possible between the various solutions and how they impact the requirements for WD products. 
• Lead pre-sales and post-sales technical engagements with key customers and OEM partners — including design reviews, proof-of-concept builds, and performance validation — ensuring HDD products meet customer workload requirements.
• Partner with Engineering, Product Management and Sales teams to ensure clear understanding of how the HDD is utilized and represent the customer's technical perspective in internal design reviews.
• Develop and maintain customer-facing technical documentation including architecture white papers, integration guides, and application notes, that reduce customer time-to-production of new products and technologies.  
• Translate customer pain points and deployment challenges into actionable architecture requirements with measurable outcomes; feed structured input into product management and firmware roadmap planning cycles.
• Educate engineers on the CTS and Sales team and broader engineering organization on system architectures and storage applications.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications

• 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 demonstrated ownership of end-to-end storage system design through production deployment.
• Demonstrated experience defining and owning storage architecture specifications — not just contributing to them.
• Proven cross-functional collaboration with Engineering teams across multiple product programs.
• Excellent communication skills with demonstrated ability to present architecture decisions, trade-off rationale, and technical recommendations to customer engineering teams and executive stakeholders.

Preferred Qualifications

• 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 in various storage solutions 
• Prior customer-facing or solutions architecture experience in a field application, or solutions engineering.

Skills

• Systems-level storage architecture: ability to evaluate design decisions from specification through customer production deployment, with specific accountability for trade-offs across protocol, performance, reliability, and cost objectives.
• Technical communication: ability to translate architecture complexity into clear written and verbal form for customer engineers, firmware teams, product managers, and executive audiences without losing precision.
• Cross-functional influence: track record of aligning firmware, software, hardware team in delivering products or solutions to customers.  

Additional Information

All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.

Western Digital is committed to providing equal opportunities to all applicants and employees and will not discriminate against any applicant or employee based on their race, color, ancestry, religion (including religious dress and grooming standards), sex (including pregnancy, childbirth or related medical conditions, breastfeeding or related medical conditions), gender (including a person’s gender identity, gender expression, and gender-related appearance and behavior, whether or not stereotypically associated with the person’s assigned sex at birth), age, national origin, sexual orientation, medical condition, marital status (including domestic partnership status), physical disability, mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, protected medical and family care leave, Civil Air Patrol status, military and veteran status, or other legally protected characteristics. We also prohibit harassment of any individual on any of the characteristics listed above. Our non-discrimination policy applies to all aspects of employment. We comply with the laws and regulations set forth in the "Know Your Rights: Workplace Discrimination is Illegal” poster. Our pay transparency policy is available here.

Western Digital thrives on the power and potential of diversity. As a global company, we believe the most effective way to embrace the diversity of our customers and communities is to mirror it from within. We believe the fusion of various perspectives results in the best outcomes for our employees, our company, our customers, and the world around us. We are committed to an inclusive environment where every individual can thrive through a sense of belonging, respect and contribution.

Western Digital is committed to offering opportunities to applicants with disabilities and ensuring all candidates can successfully navigate our careers website and our hiring process. Please contact us at jobs.accommodations@wdc.com to advise us of your accommodation request. In your email, please include a description of the specific accommodation you are requesting as well as the job title and requisition number of the position for which you are applying.

Based on our experience, we anticipate that the application deadline will be 09/8/2026 (3 months from posting), although we reserve the right to close the application process sooner if we hire an applicant for this position before the application deadline. If we are not able to hire someone from this role before the application deadline, we will update this posting with a new anticipated application deadline.

Compensation & Benefits Details

• An employee’s pay position within the salary range may be based on several factors including but not limited to (1) relevant education; qualifications; certifications; and experience; (2) skills, ability, knowledge of the job; (3) performance, contribution and results; (4) geographic location; (5) shift; (6) internal and external equity; and (7) business and organizational needs.

• The salary range is what we believe to be the range of possible compensation for this role at the time of this posting.  We may ultimately pay more or less than the posted range and this range is only applicable for jobs to be performed in California, Colorado, New York or remote jobs that can be performed in California, Colorado and New York.  This range may be modified in the future.

• If your position is non-exempt, you are eligible for overtime pay pursuant to company policy and applicable laws.  You may also be eligible for shift differential pay, depending on the shift to which you are assigned.

• You will be eligible to be considered for bonuses under either WD’s Short Term Incentive Plan (“STI Plan”) or the Sales Incentive Plan (“SIP”) which provides incentive awards based on Company and individual performance, depending on your role and your performance. You may be eligible to participate in our annual Long-Term Incentive (LTI) program, which consists of restricted stock units (RSUs) or cash equivalents, pursuant to the terms of the LTI plan. Please note that not all roles are eligible to participate in the LTI program, and not all roles are eligible for equity under the LTI plan. RSU awards are also available to eligible new hires, subject to WD's Standard Terms and Conditions for Restricted Stock Unit Awards.

• We offer a comprehensive package of benefits including 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; other voluntary benefit programs such as 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; and the WD Savings 401(k) Plan.

• Note: No amount of pay is considered to be wages or compensation until such amount is earned, vested, and determinable. The amount and availability of any bonus, commission, benefits, or any other form of compensation and benefits that are allocable to a particular employee remains in the Company's sole discretion unless and until paid and may be modified at the Company’s sole discretion, consistent with the law.

Notice To Candidates: Please be aware that WD and its subsidiaries will never request payment as a condition for applying for a position or receiving an offer of employment. Should you encounter any such requests, please report it immediately to WD Ethics Helpline or email compliance@wdc.com.

Company Description

WD is building the infrastructure behind the AI-driven data economy.

As AI scales, so does data. Every interaction, every model, every system generates data that must be stored, managed, and made accessible over time. That’s where we come in.

We combine deep engineering expertise with global-scale manufacturing to deliver the storage systems that make AI possible, powering hyperscale data centers, cloud platforms, and enterprise infrastructure worldwide.

This isn’t theoretical work. It’s real systems, at real scale, people solving some of the hardest challenges in technology today.

We’re looking for people who want to build, solve, and operate at that level.

Join us and let’s shape the future of data.