Customer Engineer (Principal Engineer) – Automotive Cockpit

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General Summary:

About the Role

As a member of the Qualcomm Japan Customer Engineering team, you will provide technical leadership and customer engineering support for automotive customers adopting Qualcomm Snapdragon® Cockpit platforms.

This role requires deep expertise in automotive cockpit system architecture, embedded systems, and complex SoC-based platforms. You will work closely with automotive OEMs, Tier-1 suppliers, and Qualcomm engineering teams worldwide to understand customer requirements, define system architectures, resolve technical challenges, and enable successful product development.

The ideal candidate will be able to translate customer requirements into technical solutions, influence system-level design decisions, and provide end-to-end support throughout the product lifecycle. This individual will serve as a trusted technical advisor to key customers, combining strong technical expertise with a customer-focused mindset.

Success in this role requires the ability to proactively identify customer challenges, influence technical decisions, build strong customer relationships, and drive solutions through collaboration across customer and Qualcomm engineering organizations.

The ideal candidate should possess a strong FAE mindset, demonstrating passion for customer success, ownership of complex technical issues, and the ability to bridge customer requirements with Qualcomm technologies, products, and roadmaps.

Skills / Experience

• Deep understanding of automotive cockpit architectures, including infotainment, digital clusters, IVI systems, multi-display solutions, audio, camera, connectivity, and system integration.
• Strong knowledge of embedded systems, including hardware/software interaction, boot architecture, BSPs, middleware, operating systems, and system-level debugging.
• Strong software development background with hands-on experience in C programming, embedded software design, and low-level system debugging.
• Experience with embedded operating systems such as Android, Linux, QNX, RTOS, or similar platforms.
• Strong understanding of SoC architecture, processor technologies, memory subsystems, power management, thermal management, performance optimization, and overall system design.
• Ability to understand, analyze, and refine customer requirements, identify technical gaps and risks, and drive discussions toward optimal system solutions.
• Experience supporting automotive OEMs and Tier-1 suppliers throughout product development, integration, validation, and commercialization phases.
• Strong customer-facing skills with the ability to build trusted relationships and become a valued technical advisor to customers.
• Ability to proactively identify customer challenges, understand both business and technical requirements, and drive solutions across cross-functional teams.
• Experience advocating customer needs internally while effectively communicating Qualcomm technologies, capabilities, and product roadmaps to customers.
• Proven ability to influence stakeholders, navigate ambiguity, and drive complex technical issues to resolution.
• Strong problem-solving, root cause analysis, and debugging skills across software, hardware, and system domains.
• Ability to lead technical discussions involving customers, product management, and engineering teams across multiple regions.
• Strong project coordination, prioritization, and stakeholder management skills.
• Self-motivated, positive, and action-oriented, with a strong sense of ownership and accountability.
• Demonstrated passion for customer success and a willingness to go above and beyond to help customers achieve their goals.
• Excellent communication, presentation, and interpersonal skills, with the ability to communicate effectively with both technical and non-technical audiences.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or a related field.
• 8+ years of experience in embedded software, system architecture, automotive engineering, customer engineering, field applications engineering (FAE), or related technical roles.
• Strong programming skills in C, with hands-on experience developing, debugging, and troubleshooting embedded software.
• Experience designing, integrating, debugging, or architecting complex embedded systems based on modern SoCs.
• Strong understanding of automotive software platforms such as Android Automotive OS, Linux, QNX, or equivalent operating environments.
• Knowledge of embedded operating system concepts, including kernel architecture, memory management, multi-core processing, multi-threading, virtualization, security, power management, and crash debugging.
• Experience with system performance profiling, analysis, and optimization techniques.
• Experience in customer-facing technical roles involving requirements analysis, system architecture discussions, technical negotiations, or executive-level customer engagements.
• Excellent verbal, written, and interpersonal communication skills.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to quickly learn and adapt to new technologies.
• Japanese language proficiency (native or business fluent) to support close collaboration with Japanese automotive customers.
• English language proficiency to communicate effectively with global engineering teams across the U.S., APAC, India, and other regions.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Snapdragon Cockpit, Snapdragon Ride, Automotive Connectivity, or similar automotive computing platforms.
• Experience working directly with automotive OEMs, Tier-1 suppliers, and other automotive ecosystem partners.
• Knowledge of virtualization technologies, hypervisors, functional safety, cybersecurity, AI/ML, or vehicle software architectures.
• Experience leading cross-functional technical initiatives in a global engineering environment.
• Proven ability to influence customer architecture decisions and drive successful technology adoption.
• Experience serving as a senior FAE, Customer Engineer, Solutions Architect, Technical Account Manager, or similar customer-facing technical leadership role.
• Demonstrated track record of building long-term customer relationships and driving customer success through technical leadership and execution.

Key Success Profile

The successful candidate is not only a strong technologist but also a customer advocate. They are energized by solving challenging customer problems, comfortable engaging with senior customer architects and engineering leaders, and capable of bringing together multiple Qualcomm teams to achieve customer success.

They consistently demonstrate technical excellence, customer focus, ownership, collaboration, and a positive "can-do" attitude when facing complex technical and business challenges.

Minimum Qualifications:

OR

Master's degree in Engineering, Information Systems, Computer Science, or related field and 7+ years of Software Applications Engineering, Software Development experience, or related work experience.

OR

PhD in Engineering, Information Systems, Computer Science, or related field and 6+ years of Software Applications Engineering, Software Development experience, or related work experience.

• 4+ years of experience with Programming Language such as C, C++, Java, Python, etc.

• 4+ years of experience with debugging techniques.

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