My Career: Where I've Been and Where I'll Be Going (8/10/2026)
Where Have I Been?
*Please forgive me if there are any noticeable grammar/writing issues, I didn't want to edit this shit after working on this for so long LOL!
In the first few months that I started my first full time job, some of my coworkers took me out to lunch and told me that they advised me to change jobs within two years. This was not shocking news to me; I had already begun to realize that at this job, I would be doing the same work repeatedly and potentially stunting my long term growth compared to other opportunities. However, even though my current job is pretty chill and paid decently well, I knew I was lacking in relevant industry experience, and because of that I didn't know if I would be able to land another role after. This made me realize that I would probably have to be doing something more than just my job if I wanted to progress in my career, but I didn't know where to even start.
Because of this, I started learning as much as I could about the tech/semiconductor industry, especially focusing on which jobs might be desirable, interesting, and possible to do for me given my background. I discovered pretty quickly that I would probably need to get a masters to get anywhere in this field, and I late applied to some online part time EE degrees, thinking I would easily get in. Well, I ended up getting rejected by each school I applied to, and when I asked them why they said that I lacked the necessary experience. It felt kind of crushing at the time, but looking back it was completely true. I did my undergrad in chemical engineering with a materials science minor, and I had functionally no experience with EE at all.
It took another year of deliberation for me to realize that EE may not have been the perfect choice for me. As I looked more into EE subjects and EE jobs, I started to realize that I wasn't actually all that interested in a majority of EE topics, and that transferring to EE might be way harder than I expected. As part of this research, I actually took an introductory circuits class at a community college near me. While the class was interesting, it helped me understand that I had greatly underestimated how much EE I would have to learn in order to function in an EE masters program, much less an EE career.
The next year, I applied again to UCLA's Electronic Materials program and also to the ECE program at Johns Hopkins, and I managed to get into both. I only applied to these two programs because I knew my background fit the UCLA program, and I also knew that I was more likely to get into JHU because they allow applicants who are missing prerequisites to enroll under provisional status and complete the missing prerequisites (meaning, a circuits class) before receiving full admission. This way, my lack of experience in EE did not limit me with the JHU program specifically. I ended up choosing the UCLA program.
A bit more about the UCLA program: it is technically a materials science program focused on electronic materials and semiconductors, and much of the program is focused on fab related topics. Because of this, most people who get this degree generally go into fab focused roles, according to an email I shot to the program director before I applied. At first, I was a bit apprehensive about choosing UCLA even though that was my top choice, because I felt like due to it not being an EE degree I might not get into the "good" jobs that I had researched about from the very beginning. However, after talking to more people and gaining more perspectives, I've realized that this fear is a bit misguided.
Firstly, a lot of the jobs that I had thought might be "good" EE jobs had a lot of issues with them. I'll go more into detail on this later, but through more research I learned that many of these jobs may not actually be better than what I would get with fab or fab adjacent roles. Additionally, I would have to spend a large amount of effort to even be able to attempt to switch into those roles, which I did not think was worth it for me. I value having a lot of hobbies and interests outside just my career, and it would've been functionally impossible for me to dedicate the amount of time necessary to learn all the EE subjects I would need to learn, all while still working my job and having a life outside of work. Another major consideration of mine was that if I chose EE, I would also be giving up my chemical engineering/materials background for no reason as well.
So ultimately I decided to commit to UCLA, and with that came a ton of benefits. The program is around ~$40k, which is much cheaper than other part time online programs, and you also only have to take 9 courses. Since UCLA is on a quarter system, this means that I could potentially finish in just over two years. This is much better than JHU, which has 10 courses with an estimated completion in three and a half years, all while costing around ~$60k. I would also have to finish a circuits course before taking JHU courses, which would bump up the time to complete by another couple of months.
Also, the UCLA program should be a bit easier than the JHU program because it actually matches my chemical/materials engineering background. When looking at each program, JHU offers a couple more courses overall that I'm interested in taking, but most of those courses are in subjects such as circuit design, power electronics, or photonics, which I have almost no experience in.
In contrast, UCLA's core materials engineering based program has topics that I not only already covered within my materials minor, but it also has topics that I've learned about in work as well. Besides the core courses, I also have the option to supplement a couple of EE courses, and through those I should also be able to go through some of the more fundamental EE topics that I'm interested in, such as analog/digital circuit design, or some basics of VLSI.
A lot of the EE topics that I mentioned before with the JHU program are related to a lot of the jobs that I had in mind when I first applied to grad school. However, with another year's worth of reflection, I think I've realized that there's a good amount of risk that comes with doing an EE masters. The biggest one is that I may not actually even enjoy the topics that I might have thought were interesting at first, such as power electronics or photonics. Besides that, there is also a substantial amount of self study that I would have to go through in order to even be to take those courses at the graduate level. And finally, it might be too much of a pivot to where I'm wasting the experience that I already have. If I decided to go full on into the photonics route, for example, I may be competing with people who already focused on that in their undergrad and already have relevant work experience. Ideally, I should be leveraging my chemical and materials engineering experience in order to find some niche that I can already be very competitive in. While this last point is pretty obvious, I think I was pretty nervous about doing something that wasn't EE because all of the jobs that I was seeing people talk about online seemed to be EE related. But, something that I only realized recently is that because these jobs are more popular, then that means there may be more competition for them. I believe that there exists a whole variety of roles out there that I myself am already positioned pretty well for, and I've spent the last year or so trying to find them.
And finally, one of the strongest reasons that I think I should take UCLA is because it's what my gut tells me to do. Around when I first started my job, my parents organized some dinners with some of their friends, and I had the opportunity to ask around and try to figure out what to do with my life (I was very much suffering from the early 20s phenomenon of feeling frightened and aimless about my future). I got many different stories and many different perspectives, but I really felt that there was one big message: follow your gut. And so I think on some level I knew that UCLA was going to be the school I was going to end up with.
But now here comes the biggest problem that I've been wrestling with for the better part of the last year: What the fuck am I going to do with my UCLA Electronic Materials degree?
Where I'm Hopefully Going (1-3 Years)
This question has given me a ton of anxiety honestly, but I've started compiling certain roles and companies that I think I would have a good chance for. Honestly, this blog post was originally planned to just be a way of compiling all this information, but it really grew into a whole thing once I started talking about the past year.
Of course, I really have no idea where the hell I'll be in the next couple years, and I think it's unreasonable and a bit foolish to expect to know that. But I think having an overall vision for the places that I could be is smart, and more importantly it'll help immensely for the amount of anxiety that I feel on the daily.
I'm well aware that feelings often change. My own feelings have changed many, many times over the past year or so that I've been working in my job, and I expect them to change many many times in the future as well. However, with my one year and four months of work experience, I have narrowed down some of the traits that I am looking for in my ideal role.
Most important for me has to be a good work life balance. I have way too many hobbies and interests outside of work that I am not willing to give up. I'm alright with working overtime occasionally if I have an urgent deadline or something, but I do very much value the fact that my current job allows me to stay only from 9-5, generally speaking. Something that I am deeply wishing for is a hybrid role, however. Tons of people love remote work, but I actually do find that I enjoy coming into the office a bit. I just hate being forced to stay in the office, especially if I don't feel like there is a need for me to stay. I think having more of a hybrid schedule where I can work from home one or two days from home is probably the ideal for me.
What else is also super important is that I actually have to like my role. I know that some people are ok with their job just being a job, but if I'm going to be spending most of my waking hours at my job, I would rather that I actually enjoy it. Enjoying your job also has the added benefit of making you much better at your job, which is a double win. However, something that affects your enjoyment of work much more than work itself is the people you work with, and unfortunately I don't have as much control over that besides feeling out the company culture. Ideally I'd like to work with some chill people in a chill environment, but I think that kind of goes without saying.
As for company size, I'm ok with either a startup or a larger, established company. They each have their own perks, and I think I would have a ton to learn from both these experiences. Startups would allow me to develop a multitude of skills and wear multiple hats as they say, but being in a large company also has its own perks such as opening up the option of moving internally between roles, being able to take internal trainings, and meeting a greater amount of people. I'm just hoping for a larger amount of people around my age to hopefully make friends with, and also to have
Money wise, I'm actually a bit less worried about hitting any actual numbers. I'm already in one of the highest paid industries, but besides that I believe that the biggest cause of any financial issues has to do more with your own personal relationship with money and less to do with how much money you make. I am already somewhat frugal, so I recognize that I don't necessarily need a fuck ton of money to live my ideal life. This isn't to say that I still don't want to make money, however. I'd still want to be making a tech money salary, but I won't really have a focus on needing to make something insane like 500k a year or something. I have somewhat of an interest in retiring early, and being able to make a good salary is one of the most impactful things you can change to affect that besides adjusting the amount that you save.
What I'm actually more interested in is retaining the ability to scale up. Perhaps I'll develop a crazy interest in expensive cars or something in the future, and if I decide that I want to make that kind of insane fuck you money I still want to have that option open to me.
At the end of the day, I have a personal belief that I should always just invest in myself, especially in my 20s. Unfortunately, the biggest thing that 20-somethings is missing is experience, and the only way to gain experience is to jump into the deep end and hope that you can swim. So really I'm ok with going into whatever for my next role, as long as I am able to gain something out of it.
But to put it simply, ideally what I want is a high paying, interesting, hybrid job with a good company culture where I have to go in and be very productive for maybe 4-5 hours, and then I can just go home and do whatever I want for the rest of the day. Easy enough, right?
The Actual List of Jobs
With those thoughts out of the way, let's start listing out some actual jobs that I think may be possible in my future. Generally, I'll be starting from "lower level" jobs, and move my way up the stack to "higher level" jobs. By level, in this case, I mean something closer to level of abstraction, or how close you are to the actual physical thing. These "levels" also exist in the overall semiconductor "stack," which I will explain later.
An example of a job in the lowest level of the semiconductor/tech stack would actually be the materials sourcing. Examples of work being done here might be making the super pure silicon wafers that are then used to fabricate chips on. Go a bit higher and you might find fab/manufacturing roles, and then keep going up and you enter chip design and hardware, then software. So, generally speaking, materials/chemical engineers exist at the lower level, then electrical engineers, then computer engineers, and then the software engineers exist on top in the most abstracted space.
This is a grossly simplified view of the semiconductor/tech industry, and because of this using "level" here isn't exactly the best term to describe things. There also exists many other sections of the semiconductor industry, like tool manufacturers and EDA software, so not everything lies in a complete spectrum, but I found that this was probably one of the better ways of organizing all of the jobs that I might be able to do.
In general, I'm hoping to gain skills in chemical/materials/electrical engineering, and so the jobs that I'm looking for will be in that level of the stack as well. I'm not very much interested in the lowest level of sourcing materials, and I also know that doing something like computer architecture would probably be too high level with my background.
Like I mentioned before, not every type of role that I've looked into fits into this semiconductor stack though, so I'll also be adding in other miscellaneous sections.
Fab Roles (Lowest Level)
So traditionally, this is the sort of job that fits perfectly with my major(s) of chemical and materials engineering. There are a decent amount of roles here, but I feel like a lot of them don't necessarily fit with what I'm looking for. Many of these roles tend to have long hours, potentially slightly less pay, and less interesting work than a lot of the other options up the stack. Although I'm open to working here for a bit, I don't really want it to be my career.
Tool Owner (Fab Process Engineer)
The first job I have listed is being a tool owner in a fab. So essentially this means that you would be in charge of some kind of machine in the fab, perhaps a photolithography tool or something, and you would be in charge of making sure that the tool is producing the correct results. This job fucking sucks. You have to physically go into the fab, you may have significant on-call or off-hours responsibilities, depending on the fab and role, and you get yelled at by other people whenever something goes wrong. Even worse, the ability to scale up in this job may be pretty limited. If you do photolithography, for example, as you move on in your career you might just end up becoming only a photolithography expert, and once that happens it's a bit harder to try to jump into other different things. Those who do usually end up going into integration or management, which are still pretty fab focused roles. Example companies for this role include something like TSMC, which everyone hates. So not very desirable.
Tool Vendor (Process Engineer)
This job is pretty similar to being a tool owner in a fab, but it's generally better for a couple of reasons. From my understanding, you still are in charge of a tool, but since your company is the one making the tool, whenever the company sells a tool you kind of have to teach whatever process engineer your company sold the tool to how to use that tool. Also, you may work with the fab guy to develop better recipes and such.
In other words, as the fab guy you need to make sure that the product production is always on point and you may need to fine tune it whenever, while as the vendor guy you need to show the customer how to manage a good process on the tool.
This may be more company dependent, but from what I've seen online it seems like the work for this may be a bit more chill. There may be some more travelling involved because you may have to go visit the customers fab whenever, but I've also met some people that are able to have hybrid roles because they can just contact their customer online. From what I've seen online, it also seems like people in these roles have an easier time switching into a different role, so it seems a bit more desirable. Because of this, I think I'd be more ok with potentially getting a role from some of these companies. I don't think that I would want to have my career be completely in this one area, however.
Fab Startups (Likely Process Engineering still)
So, there are also a couple of startups in the bay area that I think would be really interesting to work for. While there is a possibility that I would need to sell my life away, I think that startups give a learning opportunity that you can't really get anywhere else. What is tough though is that I would need to make some pretty big life changes, including moving out of my parent's house, so there would be a lot of sacrifices made. Luckily, a lot of openings match my background pretty closely so I think I could be a stronger candidate at these positions.
Process Integration Engineer
This role is considered one level above a tool owner, because your job here is to see how different processes may come together in order to make the final product. To be an effective process integration engineer, you need to understand how each process works, and if something goes wrong then you will be in charge of determining what process may be the root cause. Jobs here seem a lot more interesting to me, but work life balance can still be pretty bad.
Foundry Roles (Fab Adjacent)
From what I understand, there is actually a subset of people who used to work in the fab or fab related roles who have been able to use their knowledge of the process flow in order to transition out of the fab. These roles are often at big tech companies such as Apple, Google, Meta, or fabless chip design companies like Nvidia, Broadcom, or Qualcomm, and they are able to use their knowledge of how the chip is actually physically fabricated, as well as knowledge of electrical design in order to occupy a sort of middle role between the fabs and design sides of semiconductor industry. Since these jobs are out of the fab, they generally have a better work life balance, as well as pay and benefits, and you get more variety because roles in this area are common amongst most companies related to the semiconductor industry. In order to do these types of jobs, however, you need to have an understanding of both chip design and the fabrication process. Luckily, with my degree from UCLA, hopefully I will have a pretty unique skillset that just so happens to match these types of roles perfectly. Because of this, I'm hoping to be involved in these roles the most, as it seems to sit in the perfect intersection of roles that happen to be interesting to me, good working life (good pay, work/life balance, security, etc), and most importantly match my skillset.
Finding these roles has been hard because I've found way less information about this online, but I've heard about it from people I've talked about and I've been able to start locating these roles with a bit more specific digging. While work life balance may not always be amazing here, I do get the impression that these jobs are generally better than being in the fab, however.
Although there are a ton of roles that fit my fab-adjacent definition, I have categorized these roles into two types: device and foundry. Additionally, I am also adding packaging and thermal roles into this category.
Device Engineer
This is a super interesting role for me. For each new process node (like a new generation of fabrication process for each new chip), the designs of each new transistor will be improved on. For example, the industry has gone from Planar FET, to FinFET, to Gate-All-Around transistors. For each of these designs, there is a whole team or subset of engineers who's job is to make sure all this stuff works and can actually be made.
So, there are people who design transistor structures, and then also people who run simulations in order to check for variations and yield analysis. There are also people who electrically characterize the transistors to better understand their properties, and form SPICE models for each transistor. They then use these transistor designs in order to make what are called process design kits (PDKs) and standard cells, which can then be used by chip designers in order to do whatever they want with.
Jobs here are all on the computer, increasing the likelihood of remote/hybrid work, and best of all you don't have to go into the fab. However, much of these work may be closer to research and development, so I feel I may be a bit less positioned to do this because I lack a PhD or something. Nevertheless, I will still have a masters soon so I meet the minimum requirement, and this is another job that I have a great desire to eventually get into.
Jobs in here require a strong knowledge of semiconductor physics, which is one of the main topics that I am hoping to study at UCLA. These roles also often require experience with many TCAD technologies, which will often be used to simulate whatever device you are working on.
Foundry Engineers
"Foundry engineering" roles consist of roles where a large part of your job description is to communicate to the fab. From what I've heard from people, a lot of these roles are called process engineers, but from what I've found online they can also often be referred to as some sort of integration engineer. In this case, you would be integrating the design into the process flow. On top of this, a lot of these roles seem to ask for some level of project management skill, which I think is also another pro for me, reasons why I will discuss later. These types of roles are also super attractive to me, not only because this type of work seems very interesting, but also because I've heard that the work life balance for this type of role seems to generally be much better than in the fab. It's also an opportunity to perfectly combine my background along with a little bit of design knowledge, which I'm interested in growing in in the future as well. There seems to be a bit of an overlap between this type of role and device engineers, so expect some amount of overlap in some of these roles. This type of role also is a way for me to possibly break into some of the bigger tech companies, which usually have some of the highest compensation. For some reason, Apple in particular has a ton of these types of roles, which makes sense if they often poach from fab companies.
Packaging Engineer
Being honest, I don't actually as much about packaging as I do the other roles that I've written about. I'll do my best, though.
Packaging first piqued my interest when I started to read online that packaging seemed to be a current bottleneck within the chip industry. Lots had already been contributed to making transistors smaller and designs more efficient, but after all that was said and done there still needed to be the final step of turn the wafer die, with all of its delicate circuitry, into an actual usable chip.
This topic started to interest me even more when I started to realize that packaging engineers is a pretty common job title across many companies, and often times it was some of the only roles available that was looking for materials engineers and matched my background, at least theoretically.
Packaging also seems to work pretty well for me and my interests, as it sits in that middle group area where you need to have a wide breadth of knowledge. A big part of packaging is figuring out how multiple dies (the chip circuitry before it's actually turned into a physical chip) can be connected in a way that won't break if you blow on them or something. You also have to take into consideration a lot of different failure points, which ranges from making sure the thermals work to the chip not physically breaking, to making sure the chip still works electrically after you are done with it. So, it fits in that middle section role that I'm looking for that pulls together a lot of knowledge from different disciplines.
Also, these roles usually lie outside of the fab, and like I said before there are a ton of fabless/hardware companies that look for packaging engineers. This means that I might have more options, as well as (probably) having a better work life balance and pay. It's also kind of exciting to maybe potentially be involved in something that pushes the semiconductor industry as a whole forward, although to be fair I suspect a reason why packaging has been overlooked for so long is because it's deep in the back end and honestly not as sexy as something like chip design or something.
Chip Design (Higher Level):
This is heavily entering EE territory now, so these jobs are deviating a lot more from my background. It's still possible to find work in this area for me I think, but I would need to spend a lot of time learning some background knowledge and gaining skills, and at this high up a level I'm not even sure how much of my other knowledge would even be applicable, which means I'd be wasting some of my chemical/materials engineering background.
To my understanding, there are two types of chip design: digital and analog.
Digital chip design is typically divided into front-end and back-end roles. Front-end digital designers focus on architecture and logic design, using hardware description languages to define functionality, verify correctness, and optimize performance and power at a high level. This work is more abstract and software-like, emphasizing algorithms, verification, and system behavior rather than device physics. Back-end digital design, often referred to as physical design, translates this logic into a manufacturable layout by handling placement, routing, timing closure, and power integrity. Back-end engineers must understand both design intent and process constraints, as physical effects such as wire delays, congestion, and variation strongly influence final chip performance and yield. Layout, which is the last step of the chip designing process where you actually designing all the shapes that end up being on the photomask, is a prime example of a back end physical design job.
Jobs here are all computer related, so you get to work more hybrid or remote, but during tape out times there's a ton of stress and deadlines, especially for backend, because you are the final step. Also, generally speaking, there seems to be a sense of pessimism with this sort of job, as it's something that AI may be able to replace in the near future. Regardless, there still seems to be a good amount of competition for digital design roles, especially with companies like Nvidia going crazy on the stocks recently.
Analog chip design focuses on creating circuits that directly interact with real-world electrical signals, such as voltages, currents, noise, and timing variations. Analog designers work on blocks like amplifiers, data converters, regulators, and sensor interfaces, where small changes in device behavior or layout can significantly impact performance. The work is highly physics-driven, requiring a strong understanding of semiconductor device behavior, process variation, and parasitics. Design often involves iterative simulation, schematic tuning, and close collaboration with layout engineers to ensure circuits behave as intended once fabricated. Because analog circuits are sensitive to manufacturing effects, analog designers frequently engage with process and device engineers to understand limitations and tradeoffs.
I've heard analog described as more of an art, and that you technically only need a high school education to do it. From my limited perspective, however, it does seem like nowadays most people who try to get into this field have masters already. There still is competition for analog roles, but I've heard it described as something that's very hard to do, so the people that are good at this oftentimes end up in very high positions.
At first, when I first joined my current company and I was thinking of where I wanted to go next, I was thinking a lot about transitioning to work in this type of space. Since I was working with designing photomasks and doing a job that most closely can be described as layout, I was thinking of trying to switch to do physical design or maybe even digital design at a bigger company. However, as I've looked more into the semiconductor industry, I've realized that although the work that I'm doing right now seems similar on paper, I'm not sure if I would have the right skills or even knowledge in order to do layout in a different company, let alone digital design. Hearing those roles described and realizing that the jobs felt a bit like a discount software engineering with less pay and more work also turned me a bit off. I realized that I would be putting in a ton of work to compete with other very capable people for a job that I might even like and that might not even be better than what I could get by doing something else.
Analog design had also always been interesting to me, since it feels a bit more "real," but in order to do that job I would also have to sink in many, many hours into learning all the intricacies of that field. I'm not saying I couldn't do it, since the work seems interesting to me and there appears to be still a large amount of roles here that won't be replaced by AI anytime soon, but right now I think that anything too chip design heavy is something that I may want to avoid.
I still want to learn some basics of design and understand all the fundamentals, but as a job I think I've realized that the cost benefits just aren't there for me. Also, the more I looked into process engineering, the more I realized that I shouldn't necessarily be afraid of those types of roles. I still want to avoid going into the fab as much as possible, but there is a plethora of other jobs out there that I can possibly do that still match my background.
Other Misc Roles:
Although I've sorted a lot of jobs already into either in the fab or out of fab, I still wanted to list out some other potential roles that I think I may be able to do in the future that don't really fit into these two categories. Generally, these roles match my background a little bit less, but there should still be enough overlap where I think it could be possible to try to apply to these jobs as well.
Battery/Energy Roles:
Quantum Computing:
Photonic Chips:
Thermal Roles:
Thermal engineering is one of those roles that I thought was very compelling, only for me to realize that I may be a bit out of my depth here, similar to chip design. I do think that this another fab-adjacent role that I have the potential to get into, but I wouldn't say that it is particularly high up on my list of priorities. However, I do have faith in thermal engineering as a career. As devices get smaller and more powerful, being able to effectively manage and dissipate heat has become a huge constraint. Like packing, from what I've seen, thermal engineering is one of the bottlenecks within the whole stack with a ton of space to improve, which is exciting for the future.
A lot of thermal engineering roles tend to be very simulation heavy, where you model heat flow and design cooling systems. All this stuff is sounds like something I theoretically may know about from my chemical engineering background, but I think I severely lack experience and knowledge when it comes to these roles. I will still keep an eye out for this kind of stuff, however.
*This blurb was written a couple months back, and since then I have had the opportunity to take a class specifically on thermals in my masters program. It's been super interesting, and I think I've learned a lot, but I still am not super sure how I would be able to apply this directly to a thermal engineering role. I think a lot of what I'd be targeting might have to do more with packaging, although I will keep my options open!
Into the Farther (>10 years?) Future
Appendix - List of Jobs
Fab / Process Engineering
Process Engineering
- Process Engineer
- Process Development Engineer
- Process Integration Engineer
- Process Development & Integration Engineer
- Module Process Engineer
- Process Control Engineer
- Process Optimization Engineer
- Manufacturing Process Engineer
- Yield Engineer
- Semiconductor Manufacturing Engineer
- Process Sustaining Engineer
Example companies: TSMC, Intel, Samsung, GlobalFoundries, Micron, Texas Instruments, onsemi, STMicroelectronics
Equipment / Tool Engineering
- Equipment Engineer
- Tool Owner
- Equipment Process Engineer
- Process Engineer — Semiconductor Equipment
- Applications Engineer
- Field Applications Engineer
- Process Applications Engineer
- Customer Process Engineer
Example companies: Applied Materials, Lam Research, ASML, KLA, Tokyo Electron, ASM International, Axcelis Technologies
Metrology / Inspection
- Metrology Engineer
- Process Metrology Engineer
- Semiconductor Metrology Engineer
- Defect Metrology Engineer
- Inspection Engineer
- Process Control / Metrology Engineer
- Failure Analysis Engineer
Example companies: KLA, Applied Materials, Onto Innovation, Nova, ASML, Hitachi High-Tech
Foundry / Fab-Adjacent Roles
Foundry Engineering
- Foundry Engineer
- Foundry Technology Engineer
- Foundry Technologist
- Foundry Interface Engineer
- Foundry Development Engineer
- Foundry Integration Engineer
- Foundry Process Engineer
- Foundry Technology Development Engineer
- Foundry Program / Technology Engineer
- Foundry Applications Engineer
Example companies: TSMC, GlobalFoundries, Samsung, Intel, UMC, Tower Semiconductor, SkyWater Technology
Design–Foundry Interface
- Design Enablement Engineer
- Senior Design Enablement Engineer
- Technology Enablement Engineer
- Process Design Kit (PDK) Engineer
- PDK / Technology Development Engineer
- Technology Development Engineer
- Design Technology Engineer
- Design-Process Integration Engineer
- Technology / Foundry Interface Engineer
Example companies: TSMC, GlobalFoundries, Intel, Synopsys, Cadence, Qualcomm, Nvidia, AMD
Device Engineering
Device Development
- Device Engineer
- Semiconductor Device Engineer
- Device Development Engineer
- Device Technology Engineer
- Device Characterization Engineer
- Device Modeling Engineer
- Semiconductor Device Modeling Engineer
- Device Physics Engineer
- Device Integration Engineer
- Exploratory Materials & Devices Engineer
Example companies: Intel, TSMC, Samsung, GlobalFoundries, Qualcomm, AMD, onsemi, Texas Instruments
TCAD / Modeling
- Device TCAD Engineer
- TCAD Engineer
- TCAD Modeling Engineer
- Semiconductor Simulation Engineer
- Device Simulation Engineer
Example companies: Synopsys, Silvaco, Ansys, Intel, TSMC, GlobalFoundries, Samsung
Yield / Characterization
- Device Yield Engineer
- Device Characterization Engineer
- Semiconductor Characterization Engineer
- Yield Analysis Engineer
- Device Reliability Engineer
Example companies: Intel, TSMC, Samsung, GlobalFoundries, Micron, Broadcom, Qualcomm
Advanced Packaging
Packaging Engineering
- Packaging Engineer
- Advanced Packaging Engineer
- IC Packaging Engineer
- Package Design Engineer
- Package Integration Engineer
- Package Process Engineer
- Package Process Integration Engineer
- Packaging Development Engineer
- Advanced Packaging Development Engineer
- Package Technology Engineer
- Package Reliability Engineer
- Package Materials Engineer
Example companies: Intel, TSMC, Samsung, Apple, Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom, Marvell
Advanced / Heterogeneous Integration
- Heterogeneous Integration Engineer
- 2.5D / 3D Integration Engineer
- 3D Integration Engineer
- Chiplet Integration Engineer
- Advanced Interconnect Engineer
- Hybrid Bonding Process Engineer
- Die-to-Wafer Integration Engineer
- Wafer-to-Wafer Integration Engineer
- Co-Packaged Optics Engineer
- CPO Packaging Engineer
Example companies: TSMC, Intel, Samsung, Applied Materials, Lam Research, Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom
OSAT / Packaging Manufacturing
- Packaging Process Engineer
- Assembly Process Engineer
- Semiconductor Assembly Engineer
- Packaging Manufacturing Engineer
- Package Test Engineer
- Packaging Yield Engineer
- Packaging Equipment Engineer
Example companies: Amkor, ASE Technology, JCET, SPIL, TSMC, Intel, Samsung
Silicon Photonics / Photonic Chips
Photonics Process / Device
- Silicon Photonics Process Engineer
- Silicon Photonics Device Engineer
- Photonic Device Engineer
- Photonics Process Development Engineer
- PIC Process Engineer
- PIC Process Development Engineer
- Photonics Integration Engineer
- Photonics Device Integration Engineer
- Photonic Technology Development Engineer
Example companies: GlobalFoundries, Intel, Cisco, Nokia, Lightmatter, Ayar Labs, Lumentum, Coherent
Photonics Design / Test
- Photonic Design Engineer
- PIC Design Engineer
- Photonics Test Engineer
- Photonic Test Engineer
- Photonics Characterization Engineer
- Photonics Reliability Engineer
- Silicon Photonics Test Engineer
- Photonics Product Engineer
- Photonics Design & Layout Engineer
Example companies: Lightmatter, Ayar Labs, Celestial AI, Lumentum, Coherent, Cisco, Marvell, Nokia
Optoelectronics
- Optoelectronics Engineer
- Optoelectronic Device Engineer
- Optical Device Engineer
- Optical Engineer
- Optical Manufacturing Engineer
- Optical Test Engineer
- Optical Systems Engineer
Example companies: Coherent, Lumentum, Cisco, Nokia, Broadcom, Marvell, Intel
Quantum Computing
Quantum Device / Semiconductor Engineering
- Quantum Device Engineer
- Quantum Hardware Engineer
- Quantum Process Engineer
- Quantum Semiconductor Process Engineer
- Quantum Device Fabrication Engineer
- Quantum Device Yield Engineer
- Quantum Device Characterization Engineer
- Quantum Hardware Test Engineer
- Quantum Device Integration Engineer
Example companies: IBM, Google, Microsoft, PsiQuantum, Quantinuum, IonQ, Rigetti, Atom Computing
Quantum / Simulation
- Quantum Simulation Engineer
- Quantum Modeling Engineer
- Quantum Systems Engineer
- Quantum Materials Engineer
- Quantum Engineering Research Engineer
Example companies: IBM, Google, Microsoft, Quantinuum, PsiQuantum, QuEra, IonQ
Nanofabrication
- Nanofabrication Engineer
- Nano-Fabrication Process Engineer
- Nano-Materials Processing Engineer
- Nanofabrication Process Development Engineer
Example companies: PsiQuantum, IBM, Google, Microsoft, NIST, university nanofabrication facilities
Chip Design / Electrical Engineering
Digital Design
- Digital Design Engineer
- RTL Design Engineer
- Digital IC Design Engineer
- Front-End Design Engineer
- Physical Design Engineer
- Physical Implementation Engineer
- Place-and-Route Engineer
- Design Verification Engineer
- Design-for-Test (DFT) Engineer
Example companies: Nvidia, AMD, Apple, Qualcomm, Broadcom, Marvell, Intel, Arm
Analog / Mixed Signal
- Analog Design Engineer
- Analog IC Design Engineer
- Mixed-Signal Design Engineer
- Analog/Mixed-Signal Verification Engineer
- Circuit Design Engineer
Example companies: Analog Devices, Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, Broadcom, Marvell, Apple, Nvidia
Layout / Design Enablement
- IC Layout Engineer
- Custom Layout Engineer
- Physical Design Engineer
- Layout Design Engineer
- Design Enablement Engineer
- Technology CAD Engineer
Example companies: Cadence, Synopsys, Intel, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Broadcom, TSMC
Note: These are significantly farther from my current background and would require substantially more EE preparation than the roles above.
Hardware / Product Engineering
- Hardware Engineer
- Hardware Product Engineer
- Semiconductor Product Engineer
- Product Development Engineer
- Product Integration Engineer
- Silicon Product Engineer
- Product Test Engineer
- Hardware Validation Engineer
- Silicon Validation Engineer
- Silicon Bring-Up Engineer
- Hardware Characterization Engineer
Example companies: Apple, Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm, Broadcom, Marvell, Intel, Google, Meta
Reliability / Quality / Failure Analysis
- Reliability Engineer
- Semiconductor Reliability Engineer
- Device Reliability Engineer
- Package Reliability Engineer
- Product Reliability Engineer
- Quality & Reliability Engineer
- R&D Quality & Reliability Engineer
- Semiconductor Quality Engineer
- Failure Analysis Engineer
- Semiconductor Failure Analysis Engineer
- Reliability Characterization Engineer
- Qualification Engineer
Example companies: Intel, TSMC, Samsung, Broadcom, Qualcomm, Apple, Nvidia, Micron, GlobalFoundries
Test / Characterization
- Semiconductor Test Engineer
- Product Test Engineer
- Wafer Test Engineer
- Wafer Sort Engineer
- Final Test Engineer
- System-Level Test Engineer
- Test Development Engineer
- Test Process Engineer
- Device Test Engineer
- Hardware Test Engineer
- Semiconductor Characterization Engineer
- Electrical Characterization Engineer
- Photonics Test Engineer
- Reliability Test Engineer
Example companies: Teradyne, Advantest, Keysight, Intel, Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm, Broadcom, Micron
Materials / R&D
- Materials Engineer
- Semiconductor Materials Engineer
- Materials Development Engineer
- Materials R&D Engineer
- Materials Process Engineer
- Materials Characterization Engineer
- Semiconductor Materials Scientist
- R&D Engineer — Semiconductor Materials
- Thin Film Engineer
- Thin Film Process Engineer
- Surface Engineering / Surface Science Engineer
- Coatings Engineer
- Deposition Process Engineer
- Etch Process Engineer
- CMP Process Engineer
Example companies: Applied Materials, Entegris, DuPont, EMD Electronics / Merck, Fujifilm Electronic Materials, Resonac, Shin-Etsu, GlobalWafers
Specific Semiconductor Process Modules
Lithography
- Lithography Engineer
- Lithography Process Engineer
- Lithography Development Engineer
- Lithography Integration Engineer
- EUV Process Engineer
Example companies: ASML, Intel, TSMC, Samsung, imec, Applied Materials
Etch
- Etch Engineer
- Etch Process Engineer
- Etch Development Engineer
- Plasma Etch Engineer
- Dry Etch Process Engineer
Example companies: Lam Research, Applied Materials, TEL, Intel, TSMC, Samsung
Deposition / Thin Films
- Deposition Engineer
- Deposition Process Engineer
- Thin Film Engineer
- Thin Film Process Engineer
- CVD Process Engineer
- ALD Process Engineer
- PVD Process Engineer
Example companies: Applied Materials, Lam Research, ASM International, TEL, Kokusai Electric, Intel, TSMC
CMP
- CMP Engineer
- CMP Process Engineer
- CMP Development Engineer
- Planarization Process Engineer
Example companies: Applied Materials, Ebara, Entegris, Intel, TSMC, Samsung
Wet / Chemical Processing
- Wet Process Engineer
- Wet Etch Engineer
- Chemical Process Engineer
- Semiconductor Chemical Engineer
- Clean Process Engineer
- Wafer Cleaning Engineer
Example companies: Entegris, SCREEN Semiconductor Solutions, TEL, Lam Research, Intel, TSMC
Manufacturing / Operations
- Manufacturing Engineer
- Semiconductor Manufacturing Engineer
- Manufacturing Technology Engineer
- NPI Engineer
- New Product Introduction Engineer
- Sustaining Engineer
- Manufacturing Development Engineer
- Operations Engineer
- Manufacturing Process Development Engineer
- Production Engineer
Example companies: Intel, TSMC, Samsung, Micron, GlobalFoundries, Texas Instruments, Apple, Nvidia
Interconnect / BEOL
- Interconnect Engineer
- Semiconductor Interconnect Engineer
- BEOL Process Engineer
- BEOL Integration Engineer
- CMOS Interconnect Engineer
- Advanced Interconnect Engineer
- Interconnect Materials Engineer
- Interconnect Reliability Engineer
Example companies: Intel, TSMC, Samsung, Applied Materials, Lam Research, imec, GlobalFoundries
Batteries / Energy Storage
Battery
- Battery Process Engineer
- Battery Cell Development Engineer
- Cell Development Engineer
- Battery Materials Engineer
- Battery Materials Development Engineer
- Battery Manufacturing Engineer
- Battery Process Development Engineer
- Battery Reliability Engineer
- Battery Characterization Engineer
- Battery Systems Engineer
Example companies: QuantumScape, Sila, Tesla, Panasonic Energy, LG Energy Solution, CATL, Gotion, Amprius, Enovix
Energy / Electrochemistry
- Electrochemical Engineer
- Electrochemical Process Engineer
- Energy Materials Engineer
- Energy Storage Engineer
- Fuel Cell Engineer
- Energy Process Engineer
- Electrochemistry R&D Engineer
Example companies: Bloom Energy, Form Energy, QuantumScape, Sila, Plug Power, Solid Power, SES AI
Thermal Engineering
- Thermal Engineer
- Thermal Design Engineer
- Semiconductor Thermal Engineer
- Electronics Thermal Engineer
- Thermal Management Engineer
- Thermal-Mechanical Engineer
- Computational Thermal Engineer
- Thermal Simulation Engineer
- Package Thermal Engineer
- Thermal/Packaging Engineer
Example companies: Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Apple, Google, Meta, Broadcom, TSMC
MEMS
- MEMS Process Engineer
- MEMS Device Engineer
- MEMS Integration Engineer
- MEMS Manufacturing Engineer
- MEMS R&D Engineer
- MEMS Test Engineer
- MEMS Characterization Engineer
Example companies: Analog Devices, Bosch, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments, Infineon, SkyWater Technology
Compound / Wide-Bandgap Semiconductors
- GaN Device Engineer
- GaN Process Engineer
- SiC Device Engineer
- SiC Process Engineer
- Wide-Bandgap Semiconductor Engineer
- Compound Semiconductor Process Engineer
- Compound Semiconductor Device Engineer
- III-V Process Engineer
- Compound Semiconductor Integration Engineer
Example companies: Wolfspeed, Infineon, onsemi, Qorvo, Skyworks, Navitas Semiconductor, Nexperia, Coherent
Miscellaneous / Adjacent Roles
- Applications Engineer
- Field Applications Engineer
- Technical Marketing Engineer
- Semiconductor Applications Engineer
- Product Applications Engineer
- Technical Program Engineer
- R&D Engineer
- Research Engineer
- Technology Development Engineer
- Semiconductor Technology Engineer
- Process Technology Engineer
- Hardware Development Engineer
Example companies: Applied Materials, Lam Research, ASML, KLA, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Intel, TSMC, Synopsys, Cadence
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