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.