Reliability & Maintenance Engineering Lead, Strategy & Execution

Vancouver, BC | On-site | Periodic customer-site travel | Full-time Your New Role and Team Vancouver, BC | On-site | Periodic customer-site travel | Full-time Your New Role and Team

Sanctuary deploys its Embodied Intelligence Platform on industrial hardware into customer facilities. As deployed cells move from launch into steady-state operation, they need a reliability and maintenance function behind them. As we build out this expansion, we need someone driven and passionate to own both the strategy and its execution.

This is a strategic role for an person who has done hands-on work or led a maintenance team directly, and now wants to establish this capability with a growing start up from first principles. You will define how we keep a growing, geographically distributed fleet running, and then build the processes, tools, partners, and people to do it. Reporting to the Solutions and Customer Success Business Unit, you will work with Solutions, Deployment, Product Launch, Platform/ML Ops, and supply chain.

• Build and own a regional, internal & contractor-based RME team. Recruit, qualify, train, certify, and performance-manage contractors and system integrators into a coherent field service network covering hardware, and platform at air-gapped sites
• Define the RME strategy and operating model , the maintenance philosophy, service tiers, SLAs, and the split between internal monitoring, regional contractors, system integrators, and customer-run teams
• Develop the internal RME process library: preventive maintenance schedules, fault diagnosis and escalation paths, spares policy, and maintenance safety procedures (LOTO and equivalents)
• Produce the training and documentation that enables customer RME teams to maintain our systems to standard, including certification where required
• Run the in-house platform monitoring team for non-air-gapped sites, with clear escalation into platform/ML Ops
• Own (not build) a fleet management tool, and drive the KPIs it surfaces , uptime/availability, MTBF, MTTR, downtime cause analysis, and spares consumption
• Define and run the dashboard reporting that makes fleet health visible to leadership, and own the initiatives that move those numbers
• Set the spares strategy in partnership with supply chain , critical-spares lists, regional stocking, and lead-time management against fleet need
• Close reliability feedback loop, feed failure and downtime data back into solutions and mechanical engineering to drive design-for-reliability and maintainability improvements
• Own the sustaining-cost model for the function , cost-per-cell maintenance accuracy and the budget for the service operation

• Engineering degree (mechanical, electrical, mechatronics etc.), or industry experience
• 5+ years in reliability or maintenance engineering for industrial automation, robotics, or capital equipment, bonus for time spent hands-on and time leading a team or function
• Experience building or participating in the scaling of a maintenance/service function, processes, partners, and metrics.
• Experience managing field execution through contractors, system integrators, customer RME teams or distributed service teams

• Fluent in reliability fundamentals, PM strategy, failure analysis, RCA, and the standard availability/MTBF/MTTR metric set
• Able to architect maintenance and training documentation and processes to be executed
• Comfortable owning a fleet management or CMMS-type tool and turning data into action
• Numerate, cost-aware and can defend a sustaining operations and spares strategy
• Strong cross-functional communicator across engineering, field partners, and customers

• Builds capability where none exists and is comfortable owning a domain end-to-end
• Pragmatic and data-driven , prioritizes the failures that actually drive downtime
• Comfortable working on a strategy and close enough to the floor to know what works
• Proactively pulls reliability requirements upstream into design than solving downstream
• Adaptable in a fast-paced environment where products and processes are still evolving
• This role involves travel to the United States and, occasionally, other international destinations. Candidates must be able to meet the applicable travel and entry requirements for the role.

Sanctuary AI is an equal opportunity employer; employment with Sanctuary AI is governed based on skills, competence, and qualifications and will not be influenced in any way by race, color, religion, gender, national origin/ethnicity, veteran status, disability status, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, mental or physical disability, or any other legally protected status. In 2023, Sanctuary AI moved into a state-of-the-art office facility and has been recognized by Linked In as a Top Startup company.

Sanctuary offers a market-leading compensation package that includes competitive salaries, equity stakes, and a full suite of benefits for permanent…