She has one of the most important jobs in the world, but most people outside of the Idaho factory where she works have never even heard of what she does.
Brienna Hall, 29, is one of a relative handful of elite engineers trained to maintain and operate extreme ultraviolet lithography machines — highly complex devices known as EUVs that create the microchips iPhones, computers, televisions, cars and more depend on.
“I thought I had the coolest job ever,” Hall told the Wall Street Journal.
“I didn’t process the fact that this job is necessary for our entire world to exist as it does,” she added.
Hall, who refers to herself as a “fancy mechanic,” is customer-support engineer for ASML, the Dutch company that invented EUVs and is the only one making them today. The business depends on her and about 10,000 similarly trained colleagues to maintain every one of the few hundred EUV’s manufacturing the world’s microchips.