customer quality engineer

Position Overview

The Customer Quality Engineer is responsible for owning customer-facing quality performance for assigned IC products in a semiconductor backend manufacturing environment. This is a hands-on individual contributor role focused on customer complaints, failure analysis, root cause investigations, and corrective actions to ensure customer satisfaction, quality improvement, and zero-defect delivery.

The role acts as the technical quality interface between customers and internal teams, driving rapid issue resolution and continuous quality improvement without ownership of enterprise QMS systems.

Key Responsibilities

Customer Issue Management

• Serve as the primary customer quality interface for assigned IC products and customers.
• Own customer complaints, deviations, and escalations; ensure timely, technically robust responses.
• Lead 8D problem-solving activities, including containment, root cause analysis, and corrective/preventive actions.
• Prepare and deliver customer-facing quality reports, 8D responses, and technical updates.

Failure Analysis & Root Cause

• Perform and coordinate failure analysis for IC and package-related quality issues (assembly, test, reliability).
• Apply quality tools such as RCA, FMEA, SPC, DOE, and data analytics to identify failure mechanisms and process gaps.
• Work closely with manufacturing, package engineering, test, and reliability teams to drive defect elimination.
• Validate effectiveness of corrective actions through data monitoring and recurrence prevention.

Quality Performance & Improvement

• Track and analyze customer PPM, escapes, DPPM, RMA data, and reliability trends.
• Drive continuous improvement actions to reduce customer complaints and improve outgoing quality.
• Support New Product Introduction (NPI) activities by ensuring customer-specific quality risks are identified and mitigated early.
• Support process change notifications (PCNs) from a customer quality impact perspective.

Compliance & Customer Requirements

• Ensure products meet customer-specific quality requirements and acceptance criteria.
• Support customer audits, technical reviews, and issue-follow-up activities as a technical contributor, not a QMS owner.
• Ensure corrective actions align with ISO/IATF principles without direct system ownership.

Key Skills & Competencies

• Strong hands-on experience with 8D, root cause analysis, and corrective action implementation
• Solid understanding of IC backend manufacturing, assembly, test, and reliability processes
• Practical knowledge of FMEA, SPC, DOE, yield analysis, and defect Pareto analysis
• Experience handling customer quality issues, RMAs, and escalations
• Strong technical communication skills for customer interaction and cross-functional coordination
• Data-driven mindset with ability to translate analysis into actionable improvements

Qualifications & Experience

• Bachelor’s degree in Engineering (Electrical, Electronics, Mechanical, or related)
• 5–9 years of experience in Customer Quality, Product Quality, or Quality Engineering
• Prior experience in semiconductor backend / IC manufacturing is strongly preferred
• Exposure to Six Sigma / Lean tools is an advantage