Director, Corporate Strategy

Western Digital Corp.; Frankfort (KY); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Western Digital seeks a senior Market Intelligence leader to shape the company’s view of HDD and adjacent markets. You will own market sizing, competitive analysis, and new venture sizing, collaborating with strategy, sales, product, and finance to drive strategic growth.

The role requires extensive experience in consulting or corporate strategy, strong quantitative skills, and exceptional executive communication; located in San Jose with remote work flexibility within policy.

Qualifications

• Minimum 6 years in top-tier consulting, corporate strategy, or market intelligence.
• Experience building market models and projections from scratch.
• Proven track record leading complex strategy projects end-to-end.
• Comfort with quantitative rigor in ambiguous, high-stakes decisions.
• Strong financial acumen linking market dynamics to business outcomes.
• Exceptional strategic thinking and structured problem solving.
• Outstanding executive communication to C-suite/Board.
• Experience in semiconductor/tech or data storage markets preferred.

Responsibilities

• Oversee market intelligence activities including TAM sizing, customer landscape, market dynamics, and competition.
• Lead as a thought leader on HDD and adjacent venture markets; monitor demand signals and customer shifts.
• Develop models and insights on AI-driven data growth, cloud capex cycles, and storage economics.
• Partner with venture teams to size new markets and build proprietary market views.
• Assess where WD capabilities create a right to play and where partnerships are needed.
• Recommend opportunities for diligence or investment and define leading indicators.
• Support quarterly business reviews and annual strategy with market outlooks.

Skills

Market intelligence

Market sizing

Competitive analysis

Strategic thinking

Executive communication

Financial acumen

Stakeholder influence

Hypothesis testing

Education

Bachelor’s degree

MBA or equivalent

Job description

Company Description

WD is building the infrastructure behind the AI-driven data economy.

As AI scales, so does data. Every interaction, every model, every system generates data that must be stored, managed, and made accessible over time. That’s where we come in.

We combine deep engineering expertise with global-scale manufacturing to deliver the storage systems that make AI possible, powering hyperscale data centers, cloud platforms, and enterprise infrastructure worldwide.

This isn’t theoretical work. It’s real systems, at real scale, people solving some of the hardest challenges in technology today.

We’re looking for people who want to build, solve, and operate at that level.

Join us and let’s shape the future of data.

Job Description

Market intelligence

• Oversee market intelligence activities including market sizing (TAM), customer landscape analysis, market dynamics, competitive landscape, and substitution threats.

• Act as though leader within the organization and maintain perspectives on the core business segment (HDD) and adjacent new venture markets. Keep up to date on demand signals, technology, and customer behavior shift.

• Develop new analytical models and insights to help Western Digital navigate future industry trends, including AI-driven data growth, cloud capital expenditure cycles, and storage tiering economics.

New ventures

• Partner with venture teams to size new emerging markets, develop proprietary market views as WD offerings mature for key segments.

• Assess where Western Digital’s technology, manufacturing scale, and customer relationships create a right to play, and where entry would demand capabilities the company would have to build, buy, or partner for.

• Recommend which opportunities merit deeper diligence or investment and which to monitor or set aside, and define the leading indicators that would change the answer.

Business cadence and strategy

• Support the regular business cadence, including quarterly market reviews for senior leadership and the annual strategy cycle, contributing the market outlook and scenarios that anchor long-range planning.

• Partner with other members of the strategy team on ad hoc projects, bringing market intelligence into growth, portfolio, ecosystem, and investment work.

• Partner with functional leaders across sales, product, marketing, and finance to support business activities where clear market intelligence is needed — pricing and capacity decisions, roadmap choices, account planning, and business cases.

Competitive landscape

• Maintain a current, evidence-based perspective on the competitive landscape,covering capacity additions, technology roadmaps, cost positions, and commercial behavior.

• Assess where competitive moves change Western Digital’s positioning and flag the implications early enough to act on them.

External analyst and research relationships

• Own relationships with external industry research analysts, serving as Western Digital’s primary point of contact and understand gaps in perspective between 3rd party and internal company perspectives.

• Manage the research portfolio across core and new venture markets — identify gaps, new sources of insights, and help manage vendor portfolio.

Qualifications

• Minimum 6 years of experience spanning top-tier management consulting, in-house corporate strategy, or market intelligence roles.

• Experience building market models and projections from scratch, incorporating third-party perspectives, primary data sources, and expert interviews.

• Proven track record of supporting and leading complex strategy projects from hypothesis development to recommendations.

• Comfort operating with quantitative rigor in ambiguous, high-stakes decisions, including the judgment to know when data is good enough to act on.

• Strong financial acumen, with the ability to connect market dynamics to business models, unit economics, and financial outcomes.

• Exceptional strategic thinking and structured problem-solving skills.

• Outstanding executive communication, including materials development, narrative crafting, and live presentation to senior leadership (C-suite and Board).

• Proven ability to drive alignment and influence senior stakeholders.

• Domain expertise in semiconductor, technology, or electronics industries strongly preferred; familiarity with data storage, memory, or cloud infrastructure markets is a clear advantage.

Education

• Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Computer Science, Physics, Economics, or a related analytical field or comparable work experience.

• MBA or equivalent experience preferred.

Location

• San Jose, California with flexibility to be remote work within established company policies.

• 15-25% travel to meet with internal stakeholders, partners, and attend industry events.

What Makes This Role Unique

This is a wide reaching role where you will be able to work cross-functionally across the organization to support key decision making impacting future direction of the business. You will have unusual latitude to decide how the industry should be measured and modeled, and unusual visibility into how that work translates into commercial and investment decisions — at a point when AI is redefining the economics of storing data at scale.

Additional Information

WD is committed to providing equal opportunities to all applicants and employees and will not discriminate against any applicant or employee based on their race, color, ancestry, religion (including religious dress and grooming standards), sex (including pregnancy, childbirth or related medical conditions, breastfeeding or related medical conditions), gender (including a person’s gender identity, gender expression, and gender-related appearance and behavior, whether or not stereotypically associated with the person’s assigned sex at birth), age, national origin, sexual orientation, medical condition, marital status (including domestic partnership status), physical disability, mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, protected medical and family care leave, Civil Air Patrol status, military and veteran status, or other legally protected characteristics. We also prohibit harassment of any individual on any of the characteristics listed above. Our non-discrimination policy applies to all aspects of employment. We comply with the laws and regulations set forth in the “Know Your Rights: Workplace Discrimination is Illegal (https://www.eeoc.gov/sites/default/files/2023-06/22-088_EEOC_KnowYourRights6.12.pdf) poster. Our pay transparency policy is available HERE (https://www.dol.gov/agencies/wb/equal-pay-protections)

WD thrives on the power and potential of diversity. As a global company, we believe the most effective way to embrace the diversity of our customers and communities is to mirror it from within. We believe the fusion of various perspectives results in the best outcomes for our employees, our company, our customers, and the world around us. We are committed to an inclusive environment where every individual can thrive through a sense of belonging, respect and contribution.

WD is committed to offering opportunities to applicants with disabilities and ensuring all candidates can successfully navigate our careers website and our hiring process. Please contact us at [e-mail] (https:) to advise us of your accommodation request. In your email, please include a description of the specific accommodation you are requesting as well as the job title and requisition number of the position for which you are applying.

Based on our experience, we anticipate that the application deadline will be 10 /06/2026 (3 months from posting), although we reserve the right to close the application process sooner if we hire an applicant for this position before the application deadline. If we are not able to hire someone from this role before the application deadline, we will update this posting with a new anticipated application deadline.