Staff Sustaining Reliability Engineer

Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies

$120K — $150K *
Manufacturing & Automotive
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5-10 years in reliability engineering, ideally in automotive electronics or embedded systems.
  • Bachelor's in Electrical, Mechanical, or Systems Engineering; advanced degree preferred.
  • Expertise in electronics reliability practices, including failure mode analysis and degradation mechanisms.
  • Solid knowledge of reliability statistics and modeling techniques relevant to product lifecycle.
  • Proficient in root-cause analysis methodologies, such as 8D and fault tree analysis.
  • Experience in developing reliability test programs and guidelines for ongoing testing regimes.
  • Strong skills in SQL and Python for data handling and analysis; familiarity with big data platforms is essential.
  • Proficient in dashboard tools like HEX or Tableau for visual reporting and stakeholder engagement.

Responsibilities

  • Conduct reliability testing across various stages of production, including mass production and ongoing assessments.
  • Collaborate with cross-functional teams to enhance reliability strategies and manage risks effectively.
  • Evaluate manufacturing changes; create and implement validation test plans while managing escalations for issues.
  • Develop automated data pipelines to efficiently process ECU fault signals and environment stress metrics for analysis.
  • Implement real-time reliability models to predict ECU failures and assess risk exposure in the fleet.
  • Create and maintain dashboards for real-time insights integrating multiple data input sources for decision-making support.
  • Work with AI platforms to streamline diagnostics and enhance reliability workflows through empirical analysis.

Benefits

  • Eligible for an annual performance bonus.
  • Opportunities for equity participation.
  • Access to a comprehensive health and wellness benefits package.
Full Job Description
Role Summary

As a Sustaining Reliability Engineer focused on Automotive Electronics, you will own the reliability

of Electronic Control Units (ECUs) across mass-production to the hands of customers. You will combine deep electronics reliability expertise with modern big data tooling (Databricks, Python, SQL, HEX) to build the systems that detect, model, and predict failures before they reach the field. This is a high-impact, cross-functional role at the intersection of hardware reliability engineering and data engineering.

Responsibilities
  • Research and strategically implement vehicle, component, module, and system reliability testing to provide early detection of reliability issues during mass production through ongoing reliability testing, manufacturing validation testing, HASS testing, and Burn In testing
  • Collaborate with quality, manufacturing, design, and process engineering to improve reliability outcomes; cascade reliability risks from design DFMEA to process PFMEA and control plans.
  • Assess manufacturing changes and risks; develop test plans to validate them and own escalation and root-cause analysis for identified failures.
  • Build and maintain automated data pipelines in Databricks to extract, transform, and load ECU fault signals, environmental stress telemetry (temperature, memory usage) into analysis-ready datasets.
  • Develop and deploy real-time reliability modeling to surface current fleet risk exposure, predict impending ECU failures, and track trends across comparable vehicle populations.
  • Build and maintain stakeholder-facing dashboards that integrate reliability model outputs, Jira tickets, and ECU test results (Validation, ESS, ORT) for rapid insight and decision support.
  • Partner with an AI integration platform (e.g., Google Agent, Cursor) to accelerate ECU fault diagnosis, root-cause analysis workflows, and empirical grounding of future reliability requirements.
  • Maintain closed-loop integration between field reliability data and the New Product Introduction (NPI) reliability teams to ensure field issues are captured and actioned.


Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications:
  • 5-10 years of industry experience in a reliability engineering role, preferably in automotive electronics or embedded systems.
  • Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Systems Engineering, or a related discipline; advanced degree a plus.
  • Hands-on experience with electronics reliability disciplines: physics of failure, failure mode analysis, fatigue/degradation mechanisms in PCBAs and ECUs.
  • Knowledge of reliability statistics including Weibull analysis, accelerated life testing models (Arrhenius, Coffin-Manson, inverse power law), and reliability growth modeling.
  • Expert understanding and demonstrated application of root-cause analysis techniques (8D, Ishikawa, fault tree analysis).
  • Experience establishing reliability requirements, test programs, and deploying reliability testing guidelines for Ongoing Reliability Testing (ORT) and Highly Accelerated Stress Screening (HASS).
  • Proficiency in SQL and Python for data manipulation, statistical analysis, and pipeline development; experience with big-data platforms such as Databricks, Spark, or equivalent.
  • Experience with dashboard development tools (HEX, Tableau, Power BI, or similar) for visualization and stakeholder reporting.
  • Experience integrating or prompting AI/LLM tools for engineering workflows (fault diagnosis, requirement generation).
Total Rewards

Total compensation packages for full-time positions include base salary, eligibility for an annual performance bonus, and eligibility for equity.

In addition, our benefits package has been designed to support the health and wellness of our employees. For more information on RV Tech's comprehensive benefits package for full-time employees, check out our Global Benefits Site.

External candidates can apply for this role through the RV Tech Careers site (https://rivianvw.tech/#careers). If you are a current employee, please apply through our internal job board.

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