Principal Engineer, First Solar

So my name is Geethika Liyanage and I work at First Solar in Perrysburg. So right now, I'm the principal engineer in the deposition and thermal group, so in Perrysburg one. One thing is performance. We're responsible for the performance of the modules that we make, make sure everything runs well. And the second thing is throughput, meaning we're making as many modules as we can. And the third thing is the yield, basically. So everything that we make results a good module. My job is to make sure that the high volume manufacturing line is continuously going without stopping, anything that we have a downtime or excursion, we're trying to find solutions to prevent it, or reduce the frequency from that happening, making sure that we use every bit of time in our tools to produce modules. This includes continuous improvements, new technology and validating, testing, working with the other sites. So we are a global company, and we have different engineers in Malaysia, Vietnam, now that in India. So making sure that everybody's on the same page. We have alignment team, so running those alignment teams, making sure all tools are running the same exact way. We were given a challenge to improve performance within a very short period of time. So basically, trying to find the knobs that we can turn in order to gain more wattage out of the panel without going through a major change of technology. And we did it within three months of time. We ran all the tests, different types of combinations, different materials, different processes, and narrow it down to a certain processes that actually results it and then globally implement it. It's important to have the alignment between the sites. So we do travel between sites, try to align on what they're doing versus what we're doing, how we can improve. And we do travel to suppliers, new suppliers, existing suppliers, making sure that there are audits going on. So we do have quite a bit of travel involved depending on your role that might change too.