4417 - R&D Lithography/Printing Process Engineer - San Jose, CA

The solar electric industry is an exciting and rapidly growing business, providing excellent career opportunities and the great satisfaction of having a positive impact on the environment. SunPower Corp. designs, manufactures and markets high-performance solar electric technology worldwide. SunPower's high-efficiency solar cells and panels generate up to 50 percent more power per unit area than conventional solar technologies and have a uniquely attractive, all-black appearance. SunPower's PowerLight subsidiary is a leading global provider of large-scale solar power systems, with over 100 megawatts installed. For more information on SunPower please visit the SunPower website at www.sunpowercorp.com.

Summary
The solar cell technology development team is responsible for conceiving, developing and transferring new advantaged solar cell technology into manufacture. This group is located in San Jose, California, and consists of several highly skilled scientists and engineers. This team developed the original 20% all-back contact solar cell in 2005, released the 22% technology in 2007 and is presently working on the next generation technology.
We are looking for a motivated lithography process engineer to join our solar cell development team on the next generation development. This person will assist the group to understand the fundamental process requirements for existing processes, before researching and developing new improved processes from concept to production implementation. This activity involves collaborating with the other team members to understand the project goals; designing truth experiments or paper studies where appropriate, coordinating or executing the designed experiments; characterization the results; organizing and understanding the data; clear presentation and representation of the data highlighting gaps as well as conclusions; and finally determining the next step in development. An organized person with good inter-personal communication and presentation skills who would be willing to travel 10% of their time would be most suited to this position. Our organization values collaboration and teamwork highly as this promotes productivity and creativity.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities include the following. Other duties may be assigned.

• Primary individual responsibility for initiating and managing process development projects to meet SunPower solar cell process development roadmaps.
• Interface with equipment R&D for process requirements for new tool development
• Interface with production engineering to optimize printing operations
• Brainstorming new concepts with team members
• Characterization of existing processes to understand process requirements and potential improvements
• Understanding the interactions of the printing processes with both upstream and downstream processes
• Brainstorming new ideas with team members
• Paper studies to understand fundamental process mechanisms
• Cost and business analysis of new potential processes
• Designing of experiments
• Coordinating/Executing experiments in the laboratory
• Characterization of experimental results
• Understanding and presenting data
• Communicating and negotiating with internal and external project customers

Qualifications and Experience
• Minimum Bachelor in Physics, Chemistry, Engineering, or equivalent research experience required, MS/Ph.D. preferred
• 5 years experience with an industrial lithography technologies (e.g. Screen printing, LTP, inkjet etc)
• Experience with product life cycle and phase-gate development processes a plus
• Self-starter, comfortable with owning and driving a development project
• Flexible, creative problem solver good at working with diverse groups

Please send resume to David.Sneed@sunpowercorp.com.