Director, Applications Engineering

Location: Fremont, CA    |    Reports to: Chief Business Officer    |    Type: Full-time

About Ventiva

Ventiva is transforming thermal management from a system constraint into a design enabler. Our patented, solid-state ionic cooling platforms deliver targeted airflow—with no moving parts, noise, vibration, or dust—freeing critical board space, enabling chip-adjacent memory, and allowing components to sustain peak performance without throttling. These modular platforms unlock new system architectures that deliver higher performance and greater efficiency with unprecedented design flexibility, across applications from thin-and-light AI inference laptops to real-time industrial vision systems to high-density server racks.

About The Role

Ventiva’s ionic cooling technology liberates board real estate that OEMs use to build memory topologies capable of local AI inference. Turning that architectural advantage into shipping platforms is the responsibility of Applications Engineering. The Director of Applications Engineering will own the technical interface between Ventiva and every OEM, ODM, and silicon partner, from first thermal model through mass production.

What You’ll Own

• Technical ownership of OEM/ODM design engagements from concept through qualification and mass production, for Tier 1 notebook makers and the platform pipeline behind them.
• Thermal and mechanical architecture proposals that translate Ventiva ionic cooling technology capabilities into customer platform decisions – not component specifications.
• System-level integration spanning hardware and software — working alongside customer BIOS/EC and system software teams on control firmware, tuning, and platform bring-up.
• The Applications Engineering team: hiring, structure, and regional coverage across Fremont, Calif. and Taiwan.
• The technical escalation path for every active program — you are the answer when a customer’s chief engineer asks the hard question.
• Co-ownership with Engineering of design rules, integration guides, and the reference designs partners build against.
• Field failure analysis, qualification data packages, and the technical evidence that closes design wins.

What You Bring

• 12+ years in applications, systems, or platform engineering in notebook, client compute, or semiconductor — mechanical, systems, electrical, or power domain. Thermal depth welcome, not required.
• Direct experience carrying an OEM or ODM design engagement from concept to mass production; you know what a qualification gate actually requires.
• Fluency across the client compute stack: SoC power/thermal envelopes, board layout constraints, memory topology tradeoffs, and the firmware/system software layer that ties them together.
• Track record hiring and running a distributed applications team, including Taiwan/Greater China.
• Credibility in the room with a customer VP of Engineering — you can hold an architecture conversation, not just a spec review.
• BS/MS in Mechanical, Electrical, or Systems Engineering.

This is a key role for Ventiva. Applications Engineering is not support. It is where the platform argument gets won or lost. The Director of Applications Engineering is the technical author of Ventiva’s credibility with every partner that matters.

Salary Range: $190,000 – $225,000

Email resumes to careers@ventiva.com.

We are committed to creating a diverse and inclusive workplace where all employees can thrive. We provide equal employment opportunities to all applicants and employees without regard to race, color, religion, creed, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, age, disability, medical condition, genetic information, marital status, pregnancy, military or veteran status, or any other status protected by applicable law. We also provide reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and for sincerely held religious beliefs and practices.