Erika Cruz Keeps Whirlpool’s Machines Spinning

Few devices are as crucial to people’s everyday lives as their household appliances. Electrical engineer Erika Cruz says it’s her mission to make sure they operate smoothly.

Cruz helps design washing machines and dryers for Whirlpool, the multinational appliance manufacturer.

As a member of the electromechanical components team at Whirlpool’s research and engineering center in Benton Harbor, Mich., she oversees the development of timers, lid locks, humidity sensors, and other components.

More engineering goes into the machines than is obvious. Because the appliances are sold around the world, she says, they must comply with different technical and safety standards and environmental conditions. And reliability is key.

“If the washer’s door lock gets stuck and your clothes are inside, your whole day is going to be a mess,” she says.

While appliances can be taken for granted, Cruz loves that her work contributes in its own small way to the quality of life of so many.

“I love knowing that every time I’m working on a new design, the lives of millions of people will be improved by using it,” she says.

From Industrial Design to Electrical Engineering

Cruz grew up in Bucaramanga, Colombia, where her father worked as an electrical engineer, designing control systems for poultry processing plants. Her childhood home was full of electronics, and Cruz says her father taught her about technology. He paid her to organize his resistors, for example, and asked her to create short videos for work presentations about items he was designing. He also took Cruz and her sister along with him to the processing plants.

“We would go and see how the big machines worked,” she says. “It was very impressive because of their complexity and impact. That’s how I got interested in technology.”

In 2010, Cruz enrolled in Colombia’s Industrial University of Santander, in Bucaramanga, to study industrial design. But she quickly became disenchanted with the course’s focus on designing objects like fancy tables and ergonomic chairs.

“I wanted to design huge machines like my father did,” she says.

A teacher suggested that she study mechanical engineering instead. But her father was concerned about discrimination she might face in that career.

“He told me it would be difficult to get a job in the industry because mechanical engineers work with heavy machinery, and they saw women as being fragile,” Cruz says.

Her father thought electrical engineers would be more receptive to women, so she switched fields.

“I am very glad I ended up studying electronics because you can apply it to so many different fields,” Cruz says. She received a bachelor’s degree in electronics engineering in 2019.

The Road to America

While at university, Cruz signed up for a program that allowed Colombian students to work summer jobs in the United States. She held a variety of summer positions in Galveston, Texas, from 2017 to 2019, including cashier, housekeeper, and hostess.

She met her future husband in 2018, an American working at the same amusement park as she did. When she returned the following summer, they started dating, and that September they married. Since she had already received her degree, he was eager for her to move to the states permanently, but she made the difficult decision to return to Colombia.

“With the language barrier and my lack of engineering experience, I knew if I stayed in the United States, I would have to continue working jobs like housekeeping forever,” she says. “So I told my husband he had to wait for me because I was going back home to get some engineering experience.”

“I love knowing that every time I’m working on a new design, the lives of millions of people will be improved by using it.”

Cruz applied for engineering jobs in neighboring Brazil, which had more opportunities than Colombia did. In 2021, she joined Whirlpool as an electrical engineer at its R&D site in Joinville, Brazil. There, she introduced into mass production sensors and actuators provided by new suppliers.

Meanwhile, she applied for a U.S. Green Card, which would allow her to work and live permanently in the country. She received it six months after starting her job. Cruz asked her manager about transferring to one of Whirlpool’s U.S. facilities, not expecting to have any luck. Her manager set up a phone call with the manager of the components team at the company’s Benton Harbor site to discuss the request. Cruz didn’t realize that the call was actually a job interview. She was offered a position there as an electrical engineer and moved to Michigan later that year.

Designing Appliances Is Complex

Designing a new washing machine or dryer is a complex process, Cruz says. First, feedback from customers about desirable features is used to develop a high-level design. Then the product design work is divided among small teams of engineers, each responsible for a given subsystem, including hardware, software, materials, and components.

Part of Cruz’s job is to test components from different suppliers to make sure they meet safety, reliability, and performance requirements. She also writes the documentation that explains to other engineers about the components’ function and design.

Cruz then helps select the groups of components to be used in a particular application—combining, say, three temperature sensors with two humidity sensors in an optimized location to create a system that finds the best time to stop the dryer.

Building a Supportive Environment

Cruz loves her job, but her father’s fears about her entering a male-dominated field weren’t unfounded. Discrimination was worse in Colombia, she says, where she regularly experienced inappropriate comments and behavior from university classmates and teachers.

Even in the United States, she points out, “As a female engineer, you have to actually show you are able to do your job, because occasionally at the beginning of a project men are not convinced.”

In both Brazil and Michigan, Cruz says, she’s been fortunate to often end up on teams with a majority of women, who created a supportive environment. That support was particularly important when she had her first child and struggled to balance work and home life.

“It’s easier to talk to women about these struggles,” she says. “They know how it feels because they have been through it too.”

Update Your Knowledge

Working in the consumer electronics industry is rewarding, Cruz says. She loves going into a store or visiting someone’s home and seeing the machines that she’s helped build in action.

A degree in electronics engineering is a must for the field, Cruz says, but she’s also a big advocate of developing project management and critical thinking skills. She is a certified associate in project management, granted by the Project Management Institute, and has been trained in using tools that facilitate critical thinking. She says the project management program taught her how to solve problems in a more systematic way and helped her stand out in interviews.

It’s also important to constantly update your knowledge, Cruz says, “because electronics is a discipline that doesn’t stand still. Keep learning. Electronics is a science that is constantly growing.”