Staff Reliability Engineer, Hardware

- Reliability Program Ownership : Define and own the hardware reliability strategy, requirements, and budgets (reliability/availability targets, MTBF/MTBUR goals, duty cycles, mission profiles) for autonomy upfit hardware across the vehicle platform.

- DFMEA Leadership : Plan and facilitate Design FMEAs across mechanical, electrical, and electromechanical subsystems - identifying failure modes, effects, and causes; scoring severity/occurrence/detection; prioritizing with RPN/Action Priority; and driving design and test actions to closure.

- Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) : Build and maintain fault trees for safety-critical and availability-critical functions; perform qualitative and quantitative FTA, identify minimal cut sets and single points of failure, and link top-level undesired events to design, redundancy, and verification requirements.

- Reliability Modeling & Prediction : Develop reliability block diagrams, reliability allocations, and predictions; perform Weibull and life-data analysis, reliability growth tracking, and worst-case/derating analysis to forecast field performance and inform design tradeoffs.

- Reliability Testing : Define and execute HALT/HASS, accelerated life testing (ALT), and environmental/durability test programs (vibration, shock, thermal cycling, dust/water ingress, corrosion); set test-to-failure margins and design ongoing stress screens.

- Field Failure Analysis : Stand up and run a Failure Reporting, Analysis, and Corrective Action System; lead root-cause investigations (8D, 5-Whys, fishbone, fault isolation) and drive corrective/preventive actions from field and test data into design and process.

- Design for Reliability (DfR) : Embed reliability into design and milestone reviews - derating, redundancy, tolerance stack-up, thermal and vibration margin, connector/harness reliability, ingress protection - and gate designs at NPI stages.

- Supplier & Component Reliability : Partner with supply chain and vendors to qualify components and suppliers, define reliability acceptance criteria, review supplier reliability data, and manage derating, qualification, and obsolescence risk.

- Reliability Data & Tooling : Build reliability data pipelines and dashboards from warranty/field returns, machine telemetry, and test data; apply statistical methods to quantify reliability and surface emerging failure trends early.

- Cross-Functional Collaboration : Partner with electrical, mechanical, software, manufacturing, and field teams during bring-up, validation, and deployment to turn reliability findings into actionable design, process, and test changes.

- Documentation & Standards : Maintain reliability deliverables (DFMEA and FTA records, reliability plans, prediction models, test reports, FRACAS records) and develop best-practice reliability processes that support predictability, transparency, and quality.

- Education: Bachelor's degree in Mechanical or Electrical Engineering, Reliability Engineering, Physics, Mechatronics, or a related field, or equivalent experience.

- Experience: 10+ years in hardware reliability engineering for vehicles, heavy machinery, robotics, automotive, aerospace, or industrial equipment.

- Reliability Methods: Deep, hands-on expertise leading DFMEA and FTA, plus reliability prediction/modeling, accelerated and life testing (HALT/HASS, ALT), and structured root-cause analysis / FRACAS.

- Tools: Strong working knowledge of reliability and statistical tools (e.g., ReliaSoft Weibull++/BlockSim, Windchill Quality/Relex, Minitab, Python or R); familiarity with PDM/PLM systems a plus.