Yield, Reliability & Failure Analysis Engineer

Why this work matters

Touchdown is engineering modular manufacturing for the chips and memory systems future computing needs. This role helps turn a buyer's physical result into a qualified process or a defensible decision to use an existing supplier. Advanced packaging is our intended first fab class; no production fab is operating today.

Overview

You will connect lot genealogy, electrical results, physical inspection, and accelerated stress data to explain why parts fail. The work starts with a defined product and a baseline. You will plan controlled splits, challenge competing causes, and bring the result to an independent reviewer before a process or product disposition changes.

What you will own

• Turn defects, reliability failures, and field returns into bounded root-cause hypotheses and corrective actions.
• Build a defect and yield baseline by lot, process step, tool, material, and package design.
• Plan reliability stresses from customer conditions and identify valid failure mechanisms.
• Run failure analysis with documented hypotheses, controls, corrective action, and verification.
• Set a failure-analysis decision tree that names samples, destructive steps, controls, and the evidence needed to stop an investigation.
• Review corrective actions for new failure modes, cost, throughput, and customer acceptance before recommending a route change.

Technical territory

Defect paretos, wafer and package maps, SPC, DOE, sample size, confidence limits, stress conditions, FA methods, electrical localization, material and cross-section analysis, CAPA, and qualification handoff.

Representative outputs

• A baseline defect/yield map and controlled split plan with a named independent checker.
• A Pareto and genealogy-linked defect map with confidence limits.
• A reliability matrix and corrective-action record with verification criteria.
• A root-cause review that separates observation, hypothesis, test result, remaining uncertainty, and release decision.

What success looks like

• The team can say which failure mode changed and why.
• A corrective action improves accepted-good yield or reliability against a baseline.
• An independent checker can reproduce the analysis and challenge the chosen failure mechanism.
• The corrected route improves the agreed customer outcome without moving the failure elsewhere.

What you bring

• Yield analysis, failure analysis, accelerated reliability, DOE/SPC, and cross-functional disposition.
• Led yield, reliability, or failure-analysis work on semiconductor products.
• Can use DOE and SPC without confusing correlation with root cause.
• Can coordinate physical, electrical, and material analysis with independent reviewers.
• Can design informative experiments from scarce samples and distinguish measurement variation from product variation.
• Can communicate a stop, rework, reject, or further-test recommendation with its uncertainty.

Helpful experience

• JEDEC-style qualification practice
• Cross-section, SEM/EDX, or destructive analysis
• Package and interconnect failure mechanisms
• Field-return investigation
• Thermal and mechanical stress modeling

How the role works

• Applications are open; the exact work location, arrangement, compensation, and start date will be discussed during hiring.
• Early work can produce engineering plans and partner comparisons. Hands-on work begins only at qualified, authorized facilities.
• You will work with process, equipment, quality, test, customer, and supplier owners as the scope requires.