Senior Reliability Engineer

You Will

• Establish Aero Vect's reliability engineering practice, including defining processes, metrics and tooling for tracking and improving fleet reliability from design through field deployment.
• Lead failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA), fault tree analysis (FTA) and reliability block diagram (RBD) activities across mechanical, electrical and embedded systems.
• Define and track reliability metrics including MTBF, MTTR and field failure rates; build dashboards and reporting structures to give engineering and leadership visibility into fleet health.
• Analyze field failure data from our deployed fleet to identify root causes, prioritize corrective actions, and close the loop between field observations and design improvements.
• Define and manage external reliability and environmental testing programs, including accelerated life testing, vibration and shock testing, thermal cycling and ingress protection validation, working with third‑party test labs to execute.
• Partner with hardware engineers during the design phase to conduct design reviews with a reliability lens, provide DFR input, and identify failure risks before they reach production.
• Develop and maintain reliability requirements for new hardware programs and vehicle platforms, ensuring traceability from system requirements to component‑level specifications.
• Support supplier qualification activities by defining reliability acceptance criteria and reviewing vendor test data and qualification reports.
• Build and maintain reliability documentation including test plans, analysis reports, reliability growth tracking and lessons‑learned databases.

• 5–8 years of hands‑on reliability engineering experience in a hardware‑centric industry such as automotive, aerospace, robotics, industrial equipment or defense.
• Deep expertise in reliability analysis methods including FMEA, FTA and RBD, with direct experience leading these analyses on complex electromechanical systems.
• Experience defining and managing environmental and accelerated life testing programs, including writing test plans and interpreting results from third‑party labs.
• Ability to work across mechanical, electrical and embedded systems domains—understanding failure modes in each and how they interact at the system level.
• Comfort working as the sole reliability practitioner at a company, with the ability to prioritize and build a program incrementally rather than inheriting an established one.
• Strong data analysis skills and experience working with field failure data to drive engineering decisions.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to present technical findings to engineering teams and to non‑technical stakeholders including leadership and customers.

• Experience with autonomous vehicles, mobile robots or aviation and airport ground support equipment.
• Familiarity with relevant standards such as MIL‑STD‑810, IEC 60068, ISO 26262 or ARP
  4761.
• Experience with reliability growth modeling and Weibull analysis tools.
• Prior ownership of a supplier qualification or reliability acceptance testing program.
• Exposure to safety‑critical system design and its intersection with reliability requirements.
• Experience building a reliability practice from scratch at an early‑stage company.

Note:

This role will require occasional travel to Atlanta (ATL) to support field operations and testing.