Cleannroom Lithography Equipment & Production Engineer
Alice & Bob · France · 21h ago
The role
We've just built a cleanroom in Aubervilliers dedicated to the fabrication of superconducting quantum devices — a step change in our wafer capacity and in how fast we can iterate on qubit designs. The Cleanroom Operations team, created now, owns the throughput of that line.
You join as a Tool Owner and hands-on production engineer on the lithography scope: electron-beam and laser lithography, resist processing — coating, bake, development, stripping — and wet processing. It's the scope with the highest number of process steps in the flow and the tightest coupling to cycle time; when it slips, everything slips.
You're accountable for a defined set of tools: their uptime, their maintenance, their utilization, and the qualified recipes that run on them at industrial cadence. For each tool you form a binome with a Process Owner from Process Development Engineering — you own the asset and its execution, they own the recipe and its process window, and you solve the hard problems and qualify operators together. Recipe ownership and process innovation sit with them; making the tool deliver, reliably and at cadence, is yours.
You're joining a team at its creation, reporting to the Cleanroom Operations Manager. You'll build the operation rather than inherit one.
We're hiring two Tool Owners for this team, one on lithography and one on deposition and etching. If your experience spans both, apply to whichever fits best — we'll route you.
What you'll own
Responsabilities
- Uptime, maintenance, execution and utilization of your process equipment.
- Preventive maintenance, first-level troubleshooting, supplier interventions, spares and consumables.
- Monitoring tool performance, and acting on parameter drift before it turns into scrap.
- Turn the weekly wafer launch plan into a tool-level plan: maintenance, qualification runs, downtime, engineering time allocated to Process Development Engineering, and each tool's unattended-run pattern.
- Level the load across qualified technicians, replan when a tool goes down, and flag early when the plan and the committed output no longer agree.
- Run qualified recipes on experimental and test wafers, including unattended runs on critical tools.
- Escalate any step outside the process of reference to Process Development Engineering, and keep full traceability in the MES.
- Write and improve the SOPs for your tools, turning implicit know-how into something a new operator can follow.
- Qualify and train technicians, jointly with your Process Owner counterpart.
- Remove bottlenecks on your tools — cycle time, batch size, load configuration, changeover — and feed the capacity model and ramp plan.
- Track and report your KPIs; contribute to failure analysis when a fabrication cause is suspected.
- Apply cleanroom, chemical handling and equipment safety rules, and contribute to risk assessments, including for unattended and out-of-hours operation.
Your tools
The weekly load plan
Execution at cadence and quality
Operational documentation
Continuous improvement
Safety
Requirements
- 3+ years hands-on in a semiconductor cleanroom, pilot line, or micro/nanofabrication facility.
- Direct experience operating and maintaining process equipment — not only specifying or supervising it. Equipment field service experience counts.
- Preventive maintenance, troubleshooting and supplier coordination on capital equipment.
- Solid grounding in semiconductor unit processes: deposition, lithography, etching, wet processing, metrology — and in vacuum systems and their maintenance.
- Comfort with production and equipment data: MES or equivalent, spreadsheets, basic statistical analysis of tool and process data.
- Experience building a load plan under equipment, maintenance and personnel constraints, and reporting against it.
- Experience writing SOPs and training people on them.
- An ownership mindset: the availability and output of your tools are your result, not someone else's.
- The judgement to stop a run and escalate, and the habit of communicating bad news factually and early.
- Master's or engineering degree in microelectronics, materials science, physics or a related field — or equivalent experience.
- Fluent English
Strongly valued for this scope — electron-beam lithography (tool operation, job preparation, exposure strategy, cassette and holder management); direct-write or laser lithography; resist processing; wet chemistry and lift-off, with the associated handling and wet bench safety practice.
Also valued — R&D or pilot-line environments where production and development share the same tools; superconducting materials, Josephson junction or quantum device fabrication; commissioning or qualifying tools in a new facility.
Working conditions
Recruitment process
- Screening call with Alexandra, Talent Acquisition (30 min)
- Interview with the Cleanroom Operations Manager (45 min)
- Technical interview with the team (60 min)
- Leadership and fit interview (60 min)