Staff Reliability Engineer
Our Mission
SPAN is enabling electrification for all ⚡
We are a mission-driven company designing, building, and deploying products that electrify the built environment, reduce carbon emissions, and slow the effects of climate change.
Decarbonization is the process to reduce or remove greenhouse gas emissions, especially carbon dioxide, from entering our atmosphere.
Electrification is the process of replacing fossil fuel appliances that run on gas or oil with all-electric upgrades for a cleaner way to power our lives.
At SPAN, we believe in
Enabling homes and vehicles powered by clean energy
Making electrification upgrades possible
Building more resilient homes with reliable backup
Designing a flexible and distributed electrical grid
The Role
SPAN is seeking a Staff Reliability Engineer to be the technical leader for our reliability team, improve lab organization, standardize reliability test suites, improve the visibility of reliability test reports, and mentor a small team of dedicated reliability engineers. You'll set the technical direction for reliability testing across the entire suite of SPAN products—spanning electrical, mechanical, environmental, and systems-level considerations—while managing the day-to-day work of the entire team. You'll be the closed-loop-feedback function between test results and product requirements and design decisions, translating product data into clear, actionable input for design engineering teams across all disciplines.
This is a role for someone who can operate at both altitudes: hands-on enough to dig into a failure mode with an oscilloscope or X-ray machine, and strategic enough to standardize reliability test suites, prioritize conflicting test programs, and mentor junior engineers on sound reliability judgment and organizational escalation.
In this role, you will:
Mentor and develop a small, agile reliability team—setting weekly, monthly, and annual priorities, creating and reviewing proposed test plans and results, and helping the team improve their independent capabilities with both technical depth and judgment.
Own Span's DFR (Design for Reliability) program: Setting reliability targets, establishing mission profiles / usage models, creating and maintaining DFMEAs, writing reliability test plans, and creating test plans across the full suite of SPAN products.
Define reliability test strategy with program management across all domains (electrical, mechanical, thermal, environmental, and systems-level) while balancing product risk, DFMEA-based mitigations, team bandwidth, and program schedules.
Analyze reliability test results with statistical tools and translate those findings into tangible impacts that executives can understand while making clear recommendations on what levers are available to change the results.
Serve as the primary link between the reliability organization, program management, and product design in order to ensure reliability test results are integrated into programmatic continuous improvement plans
Guide root cause analysis on test failures and partnering closely with the certification and design teams to drive corrective and preventative actions (CAPAs) into product with formal engineering change orders and/or recertification (when necessary).
Collaborate with electrical, mechanical, and systems teams to grow in-house testing capabilities and determine when to engage outside labs.
Manage relationships with all third-party testing facilities used for reliability test evaluations that cannot be performed in house.
Redefine how the reliability team functions as the company scales to faster product launches that iterate on existing design and test history, including the definition of new processes, tooling, and technical standards that the Reliability group can use to expedite evaluations of new product launches.
Stay hands-on where it matters—operating tests, using Linux command line and Python for logging test data, performing statistical and reliability analysis on all data collected, summarizing and publicizing the results to appropriate teams, and getting into the lab when a problem needs a second set of hands.