Optical Development 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.

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 for 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.

The LS-SWIFT division delivers high-throughput patterned wafer inspection systems that support advanced semiconductor manufacturing. Its mission is to provide industry-leading defect detection with optimal cost of ownership across a wide range of applications. LS systems enable precise, cost-effective inspection for cutting-edge process nodes, while SWIFT systems offer comprehensive macro inspection of all wafer surfaces—capabilities that are especially critical for advanced packaging, as well as logic, memory, and automotive applications.

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

KLA is looking for an optical engineer based in Milpitas to be part of the INSIGHT engineering development team. The engineering team’s responsibility is to develop and maintain testing facilities in support of the ongoing INSIGHT product development roadmap.

• Building and aligning lasers and test equipment (working in a clean room environment)
• Participating in creating alignment and assembly procedures
• Testing (collecting data) and creating results presentations
• Managing vendors (acquiring all hardware needed for testing)
• Traveling to vendor sites to repair/ trouble shoot KLA test fixtures and occasionally traveling to the KLA Singapore manufacturing sites

The successful candidate will have optical training or equivalent work experience in the optical field and is required at a bare minimum to have at least some optical alignment and testing laboratory work. A Bachelors or Masters degree in a technical field with 3 year experience, or a masters degree in optics and 2 years work experience with optical hardware projects is required.

• Prior experience handing high quality optics
• Prior experience with laser systems alignment
• Start to finish data collection thru analysis with electronic devices (i.e., camera images, computer captured electronic data such as a power meter)
• Experience processing and presenting data and conclusions
• Past experience with KLA inspection tools integration

• Must Have Basic optical understanding
• Mechanical integration experience
• Ability and desire to work as part of a team
• Ability to work in a clean room
• Ability to clearly communicate in English
• Experience in creating assembly and alignment procedures
• Ability to travel to vendor sites around the world and visit the Singapore manufacturing location (estimate 5% international travel)

Minimum Qualifications PhD and 0 years of experience, MS and 3 years of experience and BS and 5 years experience.

We provide advanced inspection tools, metrology systems, process solutions, and…