Senior Systems Reliability Engineer - Spot

The Systems Engineering, Integration, and Test (SEIT) Department of Boston Dynamics (BD) seeks a highly talented Systems Engineer with Reliability Engineering focus who is passionate about working with an exceptional team of roboticists to develop the most capable, reliable, and robust mobile robotic system in the world.

As a Senior Systems Reliability Engineer with reliability focus at Boston Dynamics, you will support reliability program planning, identify and track causes of failure in our products, and generate data to guide the product engineering team on improvement initiatives. You will serve as a reliability subject matter expert, consulting with various subteams in helping to drive reliability improvements into evolving product designs.  Working alongside other systems engineers, design, verification, validation, test engineering, you will collaborate to analyze failures in complex electro-mechanical robotic systems, identify root causes, provide insights for corrective action planning, and drive those actions through verification stages to resolution. 

How you will make an impact  /  Day to day activities:

•  Monitor, document, root cause, pareto, and prioritize resolution for design or process defects discovered during product prototype design, development, verification testing, customer pilots and eventual field deployment.

• Lead failure analysis investigations, driving root cause identification, prevention, and corrective actions via close collaboration with cross-functional subject matter experts.

• Develop mechanisms for prioritizing failure and reliability investigation.

• Lead or support DFMEA activities, driving lessons learned into new product designs, translating engineering design risks into mitigation priorities, including verification strategies, test methods and procedures, with well defined acceptance criteria.

• Create and integrate system and subsystem reliability models with targets that achieve overall product requirements.  Author a cohesive set of reliability requirements across the product ecosystem and track estimated performance against them.  

• Work with the System Test team to develop reliability growth testing strategies, including accelerated life methods, and appropriate sample size selection. 

• Deliver executive presentations showcasing results, improvement recommendations, and implementation progress.

• Work with the Customer Success team to drive serviceability, maintenance schedules, and care plans. 

Desired skills:

• BS in Engineering or related field (MSME or MSEE preferred).

• 5+ years electromechanical systems design and development experience

• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to deliver high-level summaries to an executive audience and navigating deep technical analysis with expert engineers.

• Ability to drive complex new electromechanical embedded products through test design, execution, and analysis.

• Hands-on failure analysis of electromechanical systems, as a design engineer, reliability engineer, and/or quality engineer.

• Extensive experience with corrective action reporting processes and systems, ideally across many companies, along with experience creating and improving such systems.

• Defining test conditions, generating acceleration factors using empirical models, generating test durations, sample sizes, pass-fail criteria, setup controls, and data acquisition.

• Reliability & robustness methods, including Six Sigma, DFMEA, DVP&R, DOE, root cause analysis, data analytics.

• Highly relevant design domains, including DC motors, controllers, gear trains, bearings, encoders, transducers, cameras, user interfaces, 2-way audio, PCBAs, flex circuits, wire harnesses, slip rings, radios, compute, batteries & BMS, lighting for communication, articulating arms with end effectors, structural housings & linkages.

• Software tools including Jama, Jira, Google Suite, Testrail, Python, Matlab, Reliasoft or other statistical analysis tools.  

• Data analysis using tools such as Looker, Snowflake, and/or Tableau.  Experience writing queries in SQL.

• Diagnostics and fault management.

• Structured problem solving methods (8D, Six Sigma, Is/Is-not, Ishikawa).

• Analysis of software log data to identify failure causes.