Supplier Quality Engineer, OEM Networking

As a Supplier Quality Engineer for Networking, you will join the team responsible for setting and managing the quality and reliability standards for our OEM Router and Optical Transport products. You will collaborate to drive supplier development, ongoing performance oversight to Google's technology, business needs, and create the processes, tools, and procedures behind its powerful search infrastructure.

Your role involves extensive use of assessment techniques, strong partner management skills, and analyzing data to lead design or process improvements. Working alongside Commodity Managers and hardware specialists, you will determine technical specifications to maximize multi-sourcing, ensuring all components fit together seamlessly to keep systems operating smoothly for end users.

Behind everything our users see online is the architecture built by the Technical Infrastructure team to keep it running. From developing and maintaining our data centers to building the next generation of Google platforms, we make Google's product portfolio possible. We're proud to be our engineers' engineers and love voiding warranties by taking things apart so we can rebuild them. We keep our networks up and running, ensuring our users have the best and fastest experience possible.

Responsibilities

• Own supplier quality and reliability performance for OEM networking hardware deployed across Google’s global network and analyze large-scale field data to identify trends, predict failures, and prevent systemic issues.
• Partner with Hardware Engineering and Network Operations to define and enforce quality and reliability requirements and  influence design, sourcing, and deployment decisions to improve fleet availability, reliability, and total cost of ownership.
• Drive reliability validation and risk assessment, including accelerated stress testing and lifetime modeling.
• Investigate and resolve field quality and reliability issues, performing deep root-cause analysis and leading corrective and preventive actions with suppliers and define and track supplier KPIs and hold suppliers accountable to continuous improvement.
• Lead supplier engagement during NPI phases to ensure design, process, and test readiness for scale and conduct supplier audits focused on process control, quality systems, and reliability practices.

Minimum qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in Electrical, Mechanical, or Computer Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
• 5 years of experience in supplier quality, reliability, or hardware quality engineering for networking, server, or data center infrastructure.
• Experience in high-volume manufacturing (HVM) environments working directly with OEM suppliers.
• Experience leading cross-functional technical initiatives involving failure analysis (FA), quality systems, and root cause resolution.

Preferred qualifications:

• Master's degree in Engineering or equivalent practical experience.
  
• Familiarity with networking hardware systems including switches, routers, line cards, optics, power, and thermal management.
• Familiarity with the software stacks and Network Operating Systems that power hyperscale environments.
• Familiarity with data analysis and scripting tools such as Python, SQL, or equivalent.
• Strong background in hardware reliability engineering and formal quality management systems.
• Ability to architect new operational frameworks, drive technical clarity in ambiguous environments, and distill complex technical issues for both engineering teams and executive leadership.