How to Apply to Keysight Technologies

12 min read Last updated April 20, 2026 730 open positions
Blake Crosley
Blake Crosley Researched using publicly available information, hiring data, and ATS analysis.

Key Takeaways

  • Keysight is the HP-Agilent test and measurement lineage continued under a new name, headquartered in Santa Rosa, with about 15,000 employees and $5.3B revenue
  • The ATS is iCIMS with a Jibe Career Cloud front-end; keysight.icims.com is the authoritative application system
  • Interviews are technical and old-school, with strong emphasis on first-principles reasoning; bluffing is penalized, intellectual honesty is rewarded
  • Quantify measurement and design work on your resume using units (dB, GHz, ppm, dBc, ps) and name specific instruments, protocols, and standards
  • Aerospace, defense, and many semiconductor roles require US-person status (ITAR/EAR); state your work authorization clearly
  • Santa Rosa is the cultural HQ; be realistic about whether you want to live in Sonoma County or one of the other major sites in Colorado Springs, Santa Clara, Austin, Penang, or Boblingen
  • Engineering hiring skews senior and long-tenured, but Keysight runs a strong internship and new-grad pipeline, especially through IEEE and top EE programs
  • The pending Spirent acquisition is under regulatory review and may reshape the network test organization; do not assume the org chart in the job description will be static through 2025
  • Keysight sells to engineers, so its recruiters value domain fluency over branded logos; a strong resume from a lesser-known team often beats a vague resume from a marquee employer
  • Field Applications Engineer roles are a legitimate and respected career path here, not a sales consolation prize

About Keysight Technologies

Keysight Technologies, Inc. (NYSE: KEYS) is the world's leading electronic test and measurement company, headquartered in Santa Rosa, California, with roughly 15,000 employees across more than 30 countries and annual revenue of approximately $5.3 billion. The company has a lineage unlike almost any other employer in technology: it was spun off from Agilent Technologies in November 2014, and Agilent itself was spun off from Hewlett-Packard in 1999. In other words, Keysight is the direct organizational descendant of HP's original test and measurement division, which Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard founded in a Palo Alto garage in 1939 with an audio oscillator. That heritage is not marketing copy; it is the reason a large fraction of the oscilloscopes, signal generators, vector network analyzers, and spectrum analyzers on every RF engineer's bench in the world still say HP or Agilent on the front, and why the newer units say Keysight. Under CEO Satish Dhanasekaran, who took over in 2022 after running the Communications Solutions Group, the company has sharpened its focus on three reporting segments: Communications Solutions (5G and early 6G infrastructure, Wi-Fi 7, wireline and network test, cloud operator validation), Electronic Industrial Solutions (automotive and EV battery test, semiconductor parametric and process control, aerospace and defense, general electronics), and a rapidly growing Software and Services business that wraps everything from PathWave design tools to multi-year calibration contracts. If you design something that transmits, receives, switches, or carries current, Keysight probably sells the instrument your employer used to verify it. That engineering-customer gravity is the single most important thing a candidate should understand before applying: Keysight sells to engineers, so Keysight hires engineers, and the interview loops reflect that. Santa Rosa remains the cultural and technical center of gravity, roughly an hour and fifteen minutes north of San Francisco in Sonoma County wine country, but the company maintains large R&D and manufacturing sites in Colorado Springs, Santa Clara, Austin, Everett (Washington), Atlanta (for network test following the Ixia acquisition), Penang (Malaysia), Boblingen (Germany), Shanghai, Tokyo, and Edinburgh. Recent corporate activity includes the announced $1.5 billion acquisition of UK-based Spirent Communications, under extended regulatory review through 2025 in the US, UK, and China, which would materially expand the network test portfolio, plus continued investment in 6G sub-terahertz research, software-defined vehicle (SDV) test, and aerospace/defense programs that require ITAR- or EAR-compliant US-person status. Keysight is not a fast-moving consumer tech company and does not pretend to be one. It is a deep-technology instrument maker that pays well, promotes from within, and rewards engineers who stay for decades, which is reflected in both its stable workforce and its interview process.

Application Process

  1. 1
    Start at careers

    Start at careers.keysight.com, which is a Jibe Career Cloud storefront powered by the iCIMS applicant tracking system on the backend (keysight.icims.com). Filter by job family (engineering, software, sales, manufacturing, internship) and by location. For US aerospace and defense roles, read the job description carefully before applying, because many require US citizenship or permanent residency for ITAR or EAR reasons, and the ATS will collect that attestation during the application.

  2. 2
    Create an iCIMS candidate profile

    Create an iCIMS candidate profile. Keysight's iCIMS instance lets you import a resume from LinkedIn, Indeed, or a PDF, then parse it into the structured form fields. Always review the parsed output carefully, because iCIMS parsing sometimes drops publications, patents, or dual-degree entries that matter for Keysight's engineering recruiters. If the parser breaks your formatting, paste in plain text rather than letting garbled data ride through.

  3. 3
    Complete the voluntary disclosures and EEO questions

    Complete the voluntary disclosures and EEO questions. For federal defense contracts Keysight is subject to OFCCP reporting, so these are not cosmetic fields.

  4. 4
    Attach a resume and, for engineering roles, consider attaching a short cover let

    Attach a resume and, for engineering roles, consider attaching a short cover letter that names the specific product line, lab, or business unit you are applying to. Because Keysight has hundreds of internal teams working on everything from UXR oscilloscope firmware to VNA calibration kits, generic cover letters are less useful than a one-paragraph statement that shows you know what the team actually ships.

  5. 5
    Submit and wait for the acknowledgment email from careers@keysight

    Submit and wait for the acknowledgment email from [email protected] or a jibe-cloud address. This is routine and does not indicate human review has happened yet.

  6. 6
    A Keysight recruiter or a sourcing partner typically reaches out within one to t

    A Keysight recruiter or a sourcing partner typically reaches out within one to three weeks for a phone screen if your resume matches. For senior RF, silicon, or software roles, the initial screen is often with the hiring manager directly rather than a recruiter, which compresses the timeline and raises the technical bar of the first conversation.

  7. 7
    After the screen, expect a technical panel or a multi-round virtual onsite

    After the screen, expect a technical panel or a multi-round virtual onsite. For engineering roles this is typically four to six interviews over one or two days, covering technical fundamentals, design problems, behavioral questions, and a conversation with a skip-level manager or staff engineer. For new-grad or internship roles, the loop is shorter, usually two to three interviews.

  8. 8
    References and background check

    References and background check. Keysight runs standard pre-employment checks through a third-party vendor, and for cleared roles the government handles security clearance processing separately and on a much longer timeline.

  9. 9
    Offers are extended by the recruiter, usually by phone, with a written offer let

    Offers are extended by the recruiter, usually by phone, with a written offer letter through DocuSign within 24 to 48 hours. Keysight's offers are typically firm but reasonable to negotiate on sign-on and equity (RSUs); base salary is often tied to an internal band.

Resume Tips for Keysight Technologies

recommended

Lead with the instrument, protocol, or silicon

Lead with the instrument, protocol, or silicon. Keysight engineers read resumes looking for specific technical tokens: VNA, PNA, UXR, EXA, FieldFox, PathWave, ADS, SystemVue, 5G NR, Wi-Fi 7, PCIe Gen6, DDR5, 112G SerDes, S-parameters, phase noise, EVM, ACPR, BER, OTA, CMP, LTSpice, Cadence Virtuoso. If you have used Keysight instruments by name in past work, name them. A resume that says 'characterized a 28 GHz PA using an N5247B PNA-X' stops a Keysight hiring manager in a way that 'performed RF measurements' does not.

recommended

Quantify measurement and test work

Quantify measurement and test work. Numbers matter here more than at most software companies. Report dB, GHz, ps jitter, ppm accuracy, test time reduction, yield improvement percentage, number of DUTs characterized, and calibration uncertainty. Vague bullets lose to specific ones because Keysight's business is literally about quantifying the physical world.

recommended

Show full-stack hardware+software fluency

Show full-stack hardware+software fluency. Modern Keysight roles increasingly want engineers who can design the measurement, automate it in Python or MATLAB, drive the instrument over SCPI or VISA, and pipe the data into a PathWave or cloud workflow. Highlight any work that crosses the firmware, instrument control, and data analysis boundary.

recommended

Call out degrees, schools, and publications

Call out degrees, schools, and publications. Keysight employs an unusually high number of PhDs, especially in its microwave, photonics, and silicon measurement groups. If you have an IEEE MTT-S, EuMC, ARFTG, DesignCon, or ITC publication, list it with the full citation. Conference talks, patents granted, and PhD advisor names are load-bearing on engineering resumes and should not be buried.

recommended

Match the role family to the segment

Match the role family to the segment. Communications Solutions roles value wireless protocol depth; Electronic Industrial Solutions roles value automotive, battery, or semiconductor-specific experience (IEC 62133, ISO 26262, JEDEC, SEMI standards); Software and Services roles value PathWave, cloud, SaaS, and DevOps background. Read the job carefully and mirror the segment's vocabulary in your summary line.

recommended

For Field Applications Engineer (FAE) or sales engineering roles, lead with cust

For Field Applications Engineer (FAE) or sales engineering roles, lead with customer-facing evidence. FAEs are the technical front line in Keysight's direct sales model; recruiters want to see demo experience, customer presentations, bench-level debugging, and willingness to travel 25 to 50 percent. A pure R&D resume often does not translate unless the customer angle is explicit.

recommended

Export control readiness

Export control readiness. If you are a US person (citizen, permanent resident, asylee, refugee) and applying to an aerospace, defense, or export-controlled role, state it plainly in a short 'Work Authorization' line near the top. It saves the recruiter a disqualifying phone call and moves your file forward faster.

recommended

Keep it ATS-clean

Keep it ATS-clean. iCIMS parsers struggle with two-column layouts, text inside images, icon-based section headers, and nonstandard fonts. Use a single-column chronological resume in a common font (Arial, Calibri, Times), with clear section headers (Experience, Education, Skills, Publications, Patents), and submit as PDF unless the posting requests DOCX.

ATS System: iCIMS (with Jibe Career Cloud front-end)

Keysight runs its hiring on iCIMS, one of the most widely deployed enterprise ATS platforms in North America, with a Jibe Career Cloud front-end that provides the branded candidate experience at careers.keysight.com. The authoritative application layer is keysight.icims.com, which you can see redirect headers from when you submit. iCIMS handles requisition workflow, candidate records, compliance reporting (EEO, OFCCP, GDPR), offer generation, and background-check integration. Jibe adds the consumer-grade job search UI, SEO, analytics, and programmatic job distribution. Functionally this means your application is parsed twice: once by Jibe's search index and once by iCIMS's candidate parser. Recruiters search the iCIMS database using Boolean keyword queries, saved searches, and Talent Pools, which is why keyword alignment with the job description measurably improves surfacing. iCIMS supports LinkedIn Easy Apply style imports, structured knockout questions, conditional workflows, and candidate self-scheduling, all of which Keysight uses. The system does not run AI ranking by default for Keysight, but it does enforce hard knockouts on citizenship, work authorization, and minimum experience for specific postings, so answer those questions accurately. Keysight also uses iCIMS Text Engagement (formerly TextRecruit) for SMS follow-ups, which is why you may receive an opt-in text after applying.

  • Use the exact job title and key technical phrases from the posting at least once in your resume so the iCIMS keyword search surfaces your file.
  • Answer knockout questions honestly and completely; iCIMS will route the record into a 'not eligible' bucket that a human rarely revisits if a hard filter fails.
  • Upload a single-column PDF resume; avoid tables, text boxes, and headers/footers containing key information, which iCIMS parsing often drops.
  • If the job requires US-person status (ITAR, EAR) or a security clearance, state it on the resume itself rather than relying only on the application form.
  • Apply through the Keysight careers site or iCIMS directly rather than third-party aggregators when possible, because direct applications land in the native workflow with cleaner data.
  • If you are invited to set up a Talent Community profile, do it; Keysight recruiters actively mine their iCIMS Talent Pools for future reqs, especially in RF, silicon, and FAE families.

Interview Culture

Keysight interviews are technical, thorough, and unapologetically old-school.

The company is descended from HP's engineering culture, and the interview loop still reflects the 'HP Way' expectation that engineers can defend their work on a whiteboard, in front of peers, with math. For hardware, RF, and systems engineering roles, expect at least one interview that asks you to derive or explain something fundamental: Smith chart behavior, intermodulation distortion math, noise figure cascade, S-parameter interpretation, sampling theorem, jitter decomposition, or transmission line mismatch. Interviewers are often PhDs or twenty-plus-year veterans who designed the instruments you grew up using, and they tend to ask follow-up questions that drill into assumptions. The correct posture is to think out loud, show your reasoning, and not pretend to know something you do not; Keysight engineers have very low tolerance for bluffing and very high tolerance for a candidate who says 'I have not used that, but here is how I would reason about it.' For software engineering roles, expect a more standard loop: one or two coding interviews (LeetCode medium-range problems, often in the candidate's preferred language), a system design round, a deep dive on a past project, and a behavioral round with the hiring manager. The coding bar is reasonable rather than FAANG-extreme, but the system design bar is high for anyone interviewing for PathWave, cloud services, or instrument firmware because the systems are legitimately complex. Field Applications Engineer interviews lean heavily on scenario-based customer questions: walk us through how you would help a customer debug a 5G UE that is failing sensitivity by 2 dB; how would you demo a PNA-X to a hostile customer using a competitor's VNA. Sales and commercial roles go through a structured loop that almost always includes a live presentation or demo exercise. Behavioral questions across all tracks tend to probe collaboration across time zones and functions, because Keysight is deeply cross-site. Compensation conversations at Keysight are grown-up and direct; recruiters will ask for your target range early and are usually transparent about band. Decision timelines are steady rather than fast: one to three weeks from final interview to offer is typical, longer for leadership or cleared roles. The cultural signal to send throughout is competence, humility, and intellectual honesty. Engineers who have spent their careers measuring things to parts-per-million accuracy do not enjoy hiring people who round up.

What Keysight Technologies Looks For

  • Genuine depth in a measurement or design domain rather than breadth without anchor; pick one area and be able to defend it down to first principles
  • Fluency with Keysight (and competing) instruments and the ability to reason about measurement uncertainty, calibration, and systematic error
  • Strong fundamentals in at least one of RF/microwave, analog/mixed-signal, digital high-speed, photonics, power electronics, embedded firmware, or measurement software
  • Software literacy that complements hardware skill: Python, MATLAB, SCPI, LabVIEW, C/C++, and increasingly cloud and DevOps tooling for PathWave products
  • Ability to communicate clearly to both internal engineering peers and external customers, especially for FAE, applications, and product management roles
  • Comfort with long product cycles, regulated industries (automotive ISO 26262, aerospace DO-178C/DO-254, medical IEC 60601), and documentation discipline
  • Cross-functional collaboration across R&D, manufacturing, applications, and sales, often across US, Malaysia, Germany, and Japan time zones
  • Customer empathy and a service orientation; Keysight's business model is built on decades-long instrument relationships, and entitled or dismissive candidates do not advance
  • For new graduates and interns: strong GPA from a reputable EE, CS, or physics program, hands-on lab or project work, and IEEE or professional society involvement
  • Long-term intent; Keysight is not optimized for candidates who plan to leave in eighteen months, and the interview conversation often tests for sustained interest in the domain

Frequently Asked Questions

What ATS does Keysight use, and does it auto-reject resumes?
Keysight uses iCIMS as the authoritative ATS, with Jibe Career Cloud providing the candidate-facing storefront at careers.keysight.com. iCIMS does not perform aggressive AI-based auto-rejection by default; Keysight relies primarily on recruiter keyword searches, saved searches, and hard knockout questions (work authorization, minimum years of experience, degree requirements). If you answer a knockout question in a way that disqualifies you for that specific requisition, your record is routed out of that pipeline, but you remain in the iCIMS Talent Pool and can be surfaced for other reqs. A clean, single-column PDF resume with exact technical keywords from the job description dramatically improves your chances of showing up in recruiter searches.
Is Keysight a good place to work as an early-career engineer?
Yes, with eyes open. Keysight runs one of the larger engineering internship and new-grad programs in the test and measurement industry, and its rotation and mentorship culture is mature because many of your colleagues have been there fifteen to thirty years. The upside is deep technical apprenticeship, patient mentors, real instruments to work on, and a company that will pay for your master's or PhD. The tradeoff is pace: Keysight is not a hypergrowth startup, compensation is competitive but not Big Tech elite, and promotions follow defined bands rather than aggressive rerating. If you want to learn microwave engineering, silicon measurement, or industrial-grade software from masters of the craft, it is excellent. If you want to 10x your comp in three years, it is not.
Do I need to be a US citizen to work at Keysight?
Not for most roles. Keysight hires across all of its global sites and sponsors work visas for many positions, though specifics depend on the role and site. However, a meaningful subset of US roles, particularly in the aerospace and defense business, programs involving ITAR-controlled technology, and some programs under Export Administration Regulations (EAR), require US-person status (citizenship, lawful permanent residency, asylee, or refugee) and sometimes an active security clearance. The job description will state this explicitly, and the iCIMS application will include a work-authorization knockout question. Read the posting carefully before applying.
Where is Keysight headquartered and do I have to work in Santa Rosa?
Headquarters is in Santa Rosa, California, in Sonoma County, about an hour and fifteen minutes north of San Francisco. It is the historical and cultural center of gravity, particularly for RF, microwave, and instrument R&D, but Keysight is a genuinely global company with large engineering populations in Colorado Springs, Santa Clara, Austin, Everett (Washington), Atlanta, Boblingen (Germany), Penang (Malaysia), Shanghai, Tokyo, and Edinburgh. Many engineering roles are site-specific by necessity (lab access, calibration equipment, chambers), while software, applications, and sales roles are more often hybrid or remote within a country. Do not assume Santa Rosa is required unless the posting says so.
How long does the interview process take?
A typical Keysight interview cycle runs three to six weeks from application to offer. The phone screen usually happens within one to three weeks of applying. The technical loop is four to six interviews, often scheduled across one to two days for virtual onsites or in a single on-site day for labs that require in-person visits. Offers typically follow one to three weeks after the final interview. Cleared roles and executive roles run longer, and the Spirent acquisition review in 2024-2025 has introduced some additional caution in network test hiring. If a recruiter goes quiet for more than two weeks without explanation, a polite check-in email is welcomed and not penalized.
What should my resume emphasize to get past the Keysight screening?
Specificity, units, and named technology. Keysight hiring managers and recruiters are engineers or former engineers, and they read resumes looking for concrete markers: named instruments (PNA-X, UXR, EXA, FieldFox, E36300), protocols (5G NR, Wi-Fi 7, PCIe, DDR5, 112G), standards (IEEE 802.11, 3GPP, ISO 26262, JEDEC), tools (PathWave, ADS, SystemVue, Cadence, MATLAB, Python, SCPI), and quantified results (dB, GHz, ppm, percent yield, hours of test time saved). If you have used Keysight instruments in past work, say so. If you have publications, patents, or IEEE involvement, include full citations. Avoid two-column templates and creative layouts, because iCIMS parsing and recruiter scanning both work better with a clean, single-column chronological format.
Does Keysight pay well compared to Big Tech?
Compensation is competitive within the test and measurement and semiconductor equipment peer group (think Agilent, Teradyne, Advantest, Rohde and Schwarz, National Instruments, Tektronix), but it is not at the level of FAANG software engineering. A mid-career RF or software engineer in Santa Rosa or Santa Clara can expect strong base, annual bonus, and RSU grants under NYSE: KEYS, with total compensation that trails top Silicon Valley software employers but beats most other parts of the hardware industry. The compensating advantages are stability, technical depth, excellent benefits, genuine work-life balance, and a pension-style cultural legacy. Negotiation is possible, particularly on sign-on and RSU targets; base salary tends to be banded.
How does the Spirent acquisition affect hiring?
Keysight announced an agreement to acquire UK-based Spirent Communications in 2024 for roughly $1.5 billion in an all-cash deal. As of 2025 the transaction remains under extended regulatory review in multiple jurisdictions (UK CMA, US DOJ/FTC, China SAMR), which has slowed but not frozen hiring in adjacent network test areas. If you are applying to Communications Solutions roles that touch wireline, Ethernet, or cloud network emulation, you may encounter interviewers who are openly discussing integration scenarios. The practical advice is to focus on the Keysight role as described and avoid speculating about post-close org design in the interview; the deal could still be modified or blocked, and interviewers appreciate candidates who stay grounded in what is actually being hired for.
What is it like working at Keysight day to day?
Calmer and more technical than most tech companies. The culture still carries the HP Way inheritance of respect for engineering craft, management by walking around, and a long-term view of both products and careers. Meetings are fewer and more substantive. Labs are well-equipped, as you would expect from a company that makes the lab equipment. Remote and hybrid work are accepted where the role allows it, though hardware R&D remains site-bound. The work is rarely viral and almost never flashy, but it is meaningful: the instruments Keysight ships end up calibrating the radios, chips, and power electronics that the rest of the tech industry builds on. Engineers who thrive here tend to be patient, curious, and deeply interested in the physics of the thing rather than the narrative around it.

Open Positions

Keysight Technologies currently has 730 open positions.

Check Your Resume Before Applying → View 730 open positions at Keysight Technologies

Related Resources

Similar Companies

Sources

  1. Keysight Technologies - Official Careers Site —
  2. Keysight iCIMS Applicant Tracking System —
  3. Keysight Technologies - About Us and Corporate Overview —
  4. Keysight Technologies - Investor Relations —
  5. Keysight Technologies FY2024 Annual Report (Form 10-K) —
  6. Keysight Announces Agreement to Acquire Spirent Communications —
  7. Keysight Technologies - NYSE: KEYS Profile —
  8. iCIMS Talent Cloud - Platform Overview —
  9. Jibe Career Cloud (iCIMS) Documentation —
  10. US Department of State - ITAR Regulations —
  11. Keysight Technologies - Wikipedia —