The RoleThe Fleet Reliability Engineer owns the health, uptime, and long-term reliability of our deployed SmartMast hardware fleet. You will be the person who knows - at any moment - how many units are online, which are degrading, why units fail, and what we are doing about it. You will turn fleet telemetry into action: catching failures before they take a unit offline, driving root-cause analysis on the ones that slip through, and closing the loop with hardware design, firmware, and field-service teams so the same failure never recurs.
This is a hands-on, high-ownership role suited to a senior engineer who is comfortable operating at the intersection of hardware, embedded systems, data, and harsh-environment field operations. You will build the reliability program from the ground up: the metrics, the monitoring, the failure-tracking process, and the maintenance and RMA workflows that let the fleet scale from hundreds to thousands of units.
What You'll DoFleet health & monitoring- Own fleet-wide reliability metrics - uptime, availability, MTBF, MTTR, data-yield, and failure rates by component and by deployment environment - and report them to engineering and leadership.
- Build and refine dashboards, alerting, and telemetry pipelines that surface degrading units (power, thermal, connectivity, camera, radio, compute) before they go offline.
- Define what "healthy" means for each subsystem and set the thresholds that trigger proactive intervention.
Failure analysis & continuous improvement- Lead root-cause analysis (RCA) on field failures, from telemetry forensics through physical teardown of returned units.
- Maintain the fleet failure database and drive FMEA, reliability growth tracking, and corrective/preventive action (CAPA) to closure.
- Close the loop with hardware, firmware, and manufacturing teams - translating field failures into design-for-reliability, component-selection, and firmware changes.
Field service, maintenance & logistics- Define preventive maintenance schedules, spares strategy, and the RMA / repair-and-return process for a globally distributed fleet.
- Update installation, diagnostic, and field-repair procedures and troubleshooting guides used by internal technicians and partner crews.
- Support field deployments and complex repairs directly, including periodic travel to vessels, ports, and installation sites.
Reliability engineering & scale- Work with the hardware team to establish environmental and life-test protocols (vibration, salt-fog/corrosion, thermal, ingress, power) to qualify hardware and predict field life before deployment.
- Feed reliability requirements and acceptance criteria into new hardware revisions and supplier qualification.
- Design the reliability processes and tooling so they scale as the fleet grows into the thousands of units.
Minimum Requirements- Bachelor's degree in Electrical, Mechanical, Systems, Reliability, or a related engineering discipline - or equivalent hands-on experience.
- 5+ years of engineering experience with deployed electro-mechanical hardware, at least 2 of which are in reliability, sustaining/field engineering, or hardware operations for a fielded product.
- Demonstrated ownership of hardware reliability outcomes for a fleet or installed base - you have been directly responsible for uptime, failure rates, or MTBF/MTTR of real hardware in the field.
- Hands-on proficiency with root-cause analysis methods (8D, 5-Whys, fishbone) and reliability tools such as FMEA, fault-tree analysis, and CAPA.
- Practical experience diagnosing electro-mechanical systems using telemetry/logs, bench instruments, and physical teardown.
- Data fluency: able to query, analyze, and visualize fleet telemetry using SQL and Python (or equivalent) to find trends and drive decisions.
- Working knowledge of electronics, power systems, and mechanical enclosures, and the failure modes of hardware operating in harsh outdoor environments.
- Willingness and ability to travel periodically to field sites (vessels, ports, installation locations), including occasional international travel.
- Must be legally authorized to work in the United States and able to satisfy any customer- or contract-driven eligibility requirements associated with government and maritime-security work.
Preferred Qualifications- Experience with hardware deployed in marine, maritime, offshore, automotive, aerospace/defense, satellite, telecom, or other remote/harsh-environment fleets.
- Familiarity with IP-rated enclosures, corrosion and salt-fog effects, marine power systems, and environmental qualification (e.g., IEC 60529, MIL-STD-810, IEC 60068).
- Experience with connected/IoT or edge devices: remote diagnostics, OTA firmware updates, and interpreting embedded-system and connectivity (SATCOM/cellular) telemetry.
- Exposure to camera/optical systems, RF/software-defined radios, batteries, or edge-AI compute hardware.
- Background building a reliability or sustaining-engineering function from scratch at a hardware startup or scaling operation.
- ASQ Certified Reliability Engineer (CRE) or comparable credential.
What Success Looks Like- Fleet uptime and data-yield are measured, trending up, and visible to the whole company.
- Failures are caught proactively from telemetry rather than reported by customers.
- Every significant field failure has a documented root cause and a closed corrective action.
- Reliability feedback is shaping each new SmartMast hardware revision, and the reliability program scales cleanly as the fleet grows.
