Senior Mechanical Hardware Reliability Engineer

Senior Mechanical Hardware Reliability Engineer

San Francisco Bay Area, CA

About the Company

Our client is a high-growth autonomous logistics company that designs, builds, and operates

one of the largest automated delivery networks in the world. Their system moves critical

supplies, including medical products, food, and retail goods, quickly and reliably for major

healthcare systems, governments, retailers, and global businesses.

The company operates at global scale and is looking for practical problem solvers who thrive

on real-world challenges and rapid growth. The team is motivated by building systems that

have a direct, meaningful impact on people’s lives, and they look for people who reason from

first principles, enjoy hard problems, and move fast.

About You and The Role

As a Senior Mechanical Hardware Reliability Engineer, you will own the reliability of critical

mechanical and electromechanical systems across the company’s autonomous delivery

platform. Your primary scope may include next-generation delivery and payload handling

systems, with opportunities to own other mechanical systems depending on your experience

and background.

You’ll work at both the system and component level: defining what reliability needs to mean

for products operating at massive scale, identifying the failure modes that matter most,

influencing architecture and design, and determining how we should validate that hardware is

ready to deploy. For systems where reliability is driven as much by unit economics,

availability, and maintenance burden as by safety, you’ll help establish the appropriate

reliability targets and release criteria rather than simply executing against an existing

specification.

You’ll combine strong mechanical engineering fundamentals, hands-on failure investigation,

Design-for-Reliability, Physics-of-Failure, and statistical methods to uncover risks early and

drive them to resolution. This role requires a high degree of technical ownership and

judgment: you’ll be expected to independently identify where deeper investigation will have

the greatest impact and work across design, test, manufacturing, quality, and operations to

deliver hardware capable of long service lives at scale.

What You'll Do

• Own the reliability strategy for mission-critical mechanical subsystems or entire
• systems, such as delivery and payload handling systems, applying Design-for-

Reliability (DfR) and Physics-of-Failure (PoF) principles.

• Define system reliability targets, life requirements, and release criteria based on safety,

availability, unit economics, operational burden, and the maturity of the program.

• Translate these targets into design-level requirements, verification plans, and objective

pass/fail criteria.

• Lead system- and component-level FMEAs to identify the highest-value reliability risks,

influence architecture and design decisions, and prioritize where deeper analysis or

testing is needed.

• Develop Accelerated Life Testing (ALT) and environmental test campaigns that

efficiently demonstrate long-term performance, including determining how to revalidate

systems as designs evolve.

• Lead complex test failures and field issues from initial triage through root cause, risk

assessment, and corrective action, including making technically grounded

recommendations about hardware readiness and release.

• Sign off on test verification results and assess hardware readiness for deployment from

a reliability standpoint.

• Define operational life limits and service intervals using a combination of test data, field

returns, and statistical models.

• Provide clear technical direction in ambiguous situations, balancing reliability risk

against schedule, resources, cost, and operational impact.

• mprove the company’s reliability methods, tools, standards, and decision-making

processes as it scales.

What You'll Bring

• B.S. or M.S. in Mechanical Engineering, Materials Engineering, or a related technical

discipline.

• 5+ years of relevant engineering experience developing and validating safety-critical

electromechanical systems through delivery to customers.

• Strong mechanical engineering fundamentals and the ability to reason from first

principles about hardware behavior and failure.

• Experience owning technically complex hardware at the subsystem or system level and

independently driving ambiguous problems from risk identification through resolution.

• Experience applying reliability methods such as DFMEA, accelerated-life testing,

environmental testing, failure analysis, or life modeling.

• Demonstrated ability to identify the dominant risks in a complex system, prioritize

limited engineering and test resources, and determine when sufficient evidence exists

to support a design or release decision.

• Strong technical communication skills, including the ability to:
• explain complex technical issues clearly;
• synthesize ambiguous information into a coherent problem statement;
• write concise, decision-oriented technical documentation; and
• drive cross-functional alignment on reliability trade-offs and technical decisions

around design, supply-chain, quality, manufacturing, finance, and operations.

• Demonstrated ownership and practical problem-solving ability, including driving

technically complex issues through resolution.

• Ability to independently develop new technical depth and move fluidly between system-

level reliability questions and detailed component-level investigations.

Experience with mechanisms, robotics, long-life mechanical systems, highly utilized products,

or hardware designed for minimal maintenance is especially valuable. Experience spanning

both mechanical and electrical aspects of electromechanical systems is a plus.

Compensation and Benefits

The base salary range for this role is $140,000 to $180,000. Final pay depends on

experience, qualifications, skills, and location. The total package may also include equity,

discretionary bonuses, medical, dental and vision insurance, paid time off, and more.

Equal Opportunity

Our client is an equal opportunity employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of

any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status,

genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any

other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.

Applications are welcome from people who are traditionally underrepresented in tech. If this

role sounds interesting but you are not sure you are a perfect fit, please apply!