Role: Failure Analyst Location: San Francisco, CA Duration: 6+ months Contract Type: W2
Roles and Duties:
Receive inbound shipments and sort products based on return reason.
Maintain a list of and manage incoming and received units, and track by status (Intake, Triage, Failure Analysis, Disposition, etc.)
After training, be able to perform first level teardown and Failure Analysis (FA). This would involve removing main product enclosures without damaging the internal components, performing a visual inspection of the circuit boards and components, and measuring resistance of specific traces, while recording observations in detailed notes along with photos, videos when applicable.
Once the first-level FA is complete, would pass the unit to Mechanical or Electrical Engineering team for further analysis.
If capable, candidate would perform additional failure analysis including removing the small sub-assembly from the housing, de-soldering operations, and isolating the failure.
Summarize the warranty return trends and data, progress updates, and failure analysis in a weekly report including charts, photos, diagrams when applicable.
Ship returned units or partially FA'd units to external parties with instructions from Product Design Team or Project Management team.
Required skills:
Experience with creating a process to efficiently receive and sort up to 100 packages per week
Comfortable lifting 15-20 lb boxes
Label printing and material cataloging/binning
Using various tools to carefully disassemble hardware
Hands on skills with shop tools such as a bandsaw
Ability to follow written and/or verbal standard operating procedures for the teardown and failure analysis process
Record step-by-step observations to preserve the failure analysis history
Provide high level summary of failure analysis results using a chart or table
Comfort handling sensitive electronic components
Familiarity with Google G-suite (Sheets, Slides, etc) and/or Microsoft Excel
Ability to assign a unit to the appropriate engineer based on failure mode
Creation of JIRA tickets with a clear description of findings and photos
Nice to have skills or can learn on the job:
Using a keyence microscope, optical microscope, and instron force tester
Understanding of when advanced FA tools would be valuable:
X-ray or CT scan Potted cross-section Dye and pry (or reheating component with hot air gun)
Soldering and desoldering printed circuit board components
Using a multimeter and oscilloscope
Ability to execute basic SQL queries
Ability to decide which units are most valuable to FA from return rates, high customer impact, or other reasons
Understands and articulates the business case of business questions and the estimated value being delivered. Designs dashboards and analyses to be performed, and appropriate visualization and analytics tools to use. Identifies trends and patterns to address identified business questions and provide insights through reporting and data visualization techniques. Works with other data and analytics professionals to optimize, refine, automate and scale analysis into repeatable analytics solutions and decision support tools.