As the demand for higher areal recording densities requires a lower flying height of the slider, the variation of the flying height of the slider during drive operation becomes of great concern. The variation of the flying height is closely related with the slider design parameters such as air bearing shape, cavity depth, shallow step depth, crown, camber, pitch offset, roll offset, gram load, and so on. The objective of this work is to optimize the cavity depth and the shallow step depth, which are the control factors in air bearing design, using Robust Design method. It was found that the shallow step depth was statistically significant in affecting the variation of flying height, therefore the level of the shallow step depth should be chosen to minimize the variation of flying height.