Description
As a Customer Facing Application Engineer – Optical Interconnects, you will apply your technical expertise and customer engagement skills to support innovative interconnect solutions across data center, networking, and other high-performance connectivity applications.
Responsibilities:
- Serve as a technical interface between 3M and customers for optical interconnect solutions, with a primary emphasis on optical fiber technologies and expanded beam optics.
- Support customer design-in activities for fiber optic connectivity, optical transport, and high-speed communication systems.
- Provide technical consultation to customers, sales teams, and channel partners on product selection, application fit, system integration, and performance optimization.
- Drive adoption of 3M interconnect solutions by understanding customer architectures, technical requirements, and next-generation roadmap needs.
- Collaborate with product development, R&D, manufacturing, quality, and marketing teams to communicate customer needs and influence future product direction.
- Lead technical discussions, product demonstrations, evaluations, and troubleshooting efforts for customer applications involving optical and copper interconnects.
- Support qualification activities by developing test plans, analyzing results, and ensuring customer requirements are met with validated data.
- Assist customers in resolving field and application issues through hands-on technical problem-solving and cross-functional coordination.
- Provide application guidance related to product design, manufacturing processes, and process capability considerations to support successful product implementation and customer adoption.
- Contribute to technical documentation, application notes, customer presentations, and training materials to support product deployment and market adoption.
- Monitor industry trends, competitive technologies, and emerging standards in optical fiber interconnects and high-speed data communication.
- Ensure technical claims in customer-facing literature and communications are accurate, well-supported, and aligned with product performance.
Requirements:
- Bachelor’s degree or higher (completed and verified prior to start)
- Three (3) years of experience in a customer-facing technical, applications engineering, systems engineering, or product support role in a private, public, government, or military environment.
- Two (2) years of experience with high-speed interconnect technologies, including optical fiber and/or copper connectivity solutions.
- Current, valid Driver’s License.
Additional qualifications that could help you succeed even further in this role include:
- Bachelor’s degree or higher in Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Optical Engineering, Physics, or a related technical field from an accredited institution.
- Five (5) or more years of experience in optical connectivity for communications systems.
- Strong knowledge of optical fiber interconnects, transceiver connectivity, cable assemblies, and data center optical infrastructure.
- Experience in process engineering or process development for optical, fiber optic, or precision interconnect technologies, including process design, scale-up, optimization, qualification, validation, and transfer to manufacturing.
- Experience transferring technical knowledge and delivering technical training related to production processes, including developing training materials, providing hands-on instruction, and communicating process requirements, best practices, and troubleshooting methods to manufacturing, engineering, and customer teams.
- Familiarity with data center systems architecture, networking, AI infrastructure, and high-performance computing environments.
- Experience interpreting industry standards, qualification requirements, and test methods related to fiber optic and electrical interconnect components.
- Experience with optical test equipment and performance characterization of optical or interconnect systems.
- Ability to analyze customer requirements and translate them into application guidance and product recommendations.
- Strong troubleshooting and problem-solving skills in customer and field environments.
- Experience developing and delivering technical presentations to customers, internal stakeholders, and external partners.
- Strong communication skills, including oral, written, and presentation skills.
- Ability to work effectively across global, cross-functional teams.