Regional Division Application (RDA) Engineer

To make electronics, you need chips, wafers, transistors, reticles, and... To make these, you must see, test and manufacture them at scale—faster and better than ever before. That's where KLA comes in. Whether you're early in your career or an experienced professional, you'll solve complex challenges, work alongside brilliant minds and help shape the future of technology.

Group/Division

The Semiconductor Products and Customers (Semi PC) business unit designs, builds and sells KLA’s product portfolio to help chip manufacturers meet high-quality standards to enable technologies like AI, data centers, automotive and electronic devices. Our inspection, metrology, and analytics systems detect and monitor defects across logic and memory chips, specialty semiconductors, wafers, reticles, advanced packaging, process equipment and materials. We also develop technologies for specialty processes, IC substrates, and PCB manufacturing, including etch and deposition, component inspection, and imaging and analytics.

What You'll Do

In this role, you will play a key part in advancing business priorities by delivering high-impact work across your area of expertise.

Key Responsibilities:

1. Customer Engagement & Technical Leadership

• Give high priority to direct customer engagement, especially for strategic customers, new technologies and complex application needs.
• Build trusted technical relationships and understand customer manufacturing challenges, operational workflows and technology roadmaps.
• Lead technical discussions, application reviews and customer-site engagements.
• Translate customer needs into clear requirements, priorities and recommended actions for internal stakeholders.

2. Strategic Innovation & Operational Automation

• Focus on game-changing initiatives, with particular emphasis on operational automation and solutions that materially improve customer workflows.
• Lead or support strategic items that create business value, strengthen differentiation or enable new customer use cases.
• Address high-value needs outside the standard Product Line coverage, including customer-specific peripheral solutions
• Assess opportunities, define the application need and coordinate the appropriate internal owners for implementation.

3. New Product, Software & Feature Deployment

• Provide high-priority support for New Product Introduction, including NPI and consignment systems.
• Support deployment, qualification and adoption of new software releases.
• Lead feature filtering and request definition by clarifying customer value, use case, priority and expected outcome.
• Support feature implementation, field validation, customer acceptance and subsequent enhancement based on field feedback.

4. Application Leadership & Process Optimization

• Provide advanced support for recipe setup, process qualification, optimization and manufacturing ramp-up.
• Lead investigations of application performance and recommend improvements in quality, yield, throughput and operational efficiency.
• Support new materials, use cases and customer-specific process requirements.
• Create reusable application methodologies, best practices and technical documentation.

5. Escalation & Technical Case Management

• Own or coordinate complex application-related escalations beyond standard field support capability.
• Determine whether a case is application-related, a specification gap, a new request, or a potential software or hardware issue.
• Coordinate technical resolution across CE, Service, PSO, Product Management and Engineering.
• Ensure cases, actions, evidence, decisions and closure criteria are documented in the designated tracking systems

Minimum Qualifications

Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Physics, Materials Science, Electronics or a related technical discipline.

• Customer-facing experience in applications engineering, process engineering, product support or a comparable technical role.
• Strong analytical troubleshooting, structured problem-solving and technical communication skills.
• Experience with NPI, software or feature deployment, process qualification, or manufacturing ramp-up.
• Ability to lead work across functions, cultures and time zones without direct authority.
• Clear written and verbal English and willingness to travel to customer sites

About KLA

We provide advanced inspection tools, metrology systems, process solutions, and computational analytics that make electronics possible, tackling complex challenges. From electron and photon optics to machine learning and data analytics, we seek perfection at the most fundamental level of matter in the universe. If you want to make electronics that push industries forward and make the world a better place, join us.

Use of AI Statement

At KLA, our interviews seek to understand your individual skills, problem-solving approach and authentic thinking. To ensure a fair and consistent evaluation, the use of AI, recording tools or other technologies to generate, suggest or provide responses during interviews—whether virtual or in person—is not permitted unless explicitly approved in advance as part of a reasonable accommodation or invited by the interviewer. Use of these tools may interfere with our ability to evaluate your individual qualifications and affect your candidacy. KLA is committed to advancing innovation through responsible AI, and we value candidates who share this mindset.

We offer a competitive, family friendly total rewards package. We design our programs to reflect our commitment to an inclusive environment, while ensuring we provide benefits that meet the diverse needs of our employees.

KLA is proud to be an equal opportunity employer.

Originally posted on Himalayas