Senior Hardware Reliability Engineer

Job description

At Rhoda AI, we’re building the next generation of generalist intelligent robots. We own the full robotics stack from high-performance hardware and robot systems to the infrastructure and state-of-the-art foundation world models that control our robots. Our robots are designed to be generalists capable of operating in complex, real-world environments and handling long-tail edge cases, made possible by our cutting edge research and end-to-end system design. We've raised over $450M and are investing aggressively in model research, infrastructure, hardware development, and manufacturing scale-up to make generalist robotics a reality. As the Senior Hardware Reliability Engineer, you own reliability as an engineering discipline, not just a test outcome. Every mission profile we define, every acceleration factor we trust, every design change that prevents a failure mode from reaching hardware starts with the reliability analysis you run. Reliability starts upstream of the test bench. In this role, you decompose platform and subsystem requirements into mission profiles — the duty cycles, load spectra, and environmental exposures Robot will actually see over its life in industrial workspaces — and use them to define how test campaigns should be accelerated, not just to interpret data once it exists. Those mission profiles set the acceleration factors, sample sizes, and pass/fail criteria for the HALT/HASS, thermal cycling, vibration, and fatigue campaigns run in partnership with the test engineers. We operate as T-shaped engineers. You must be a strong generalist across electromechanical systems — actuators, motors, power electronics, structures — but your superpower for this role is translating ambiguous, early-stage requirements into mission profiles and accelerated test plans the rest of the org can design and test against. ## What You'll Do - **Mission Profile Decomposition:** Decompose platform and subsystem requirements into mission profiles — duty cycles, load spectra, environmental exposure — that define what “real-world use” means for each hardware discipline. - **Accelerated Test Planning:** Translate mission profiles into accelerated test plans: acceleration factors, sample sizes, and pass/fail criteria for HALT/HASS, thermal cycling, vibration, and fatigue campaigns, rather than only interpreting results after tests are run. - **Failure Mode Analysis:** Build and maintain FMEA/FMECA analyses for critical subsystems, and drive design changes that eliminate failure modes before they reach hardware. - **Quantitative Reliability Modeling:** Apply quantitative reliability methods (Weibull analysis, MTBF/MTTF, censored-data survival analysis, physics-of-failure acceleration models) to test and field data to predict and track reliability over time. - **Cross-Discipline Partnership:** Partner with actuator, electrical, and structures test and design engineers to turn mission profiles into test-stand requirements, and to close the loop from test failure to root cause to design fix. - **Reliability Data Infrastructure:** Build the reliability program's data infrastructure and reporting so the organization can track reliability trends and revisit mission-profile assumptions as the platform scales from prototype to production. ## What You'll Bring - **Education:** Bachelor's or Master's degree in Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Reliability Engineering, or a related field. - **Experience:** 5+ years in reliability engineering, with demonstrated ownership of mission profile development and accelerated test design. - **Mission Profile Development:** Experience developing mission profiles or usage/environmental duty-cycle models from product requirements, and using them to define accelerated test plans. - **Acceleration Models:** Working knowledge of acceleration models (Arrhenius, Coffin-Manson, inverse power law, or similar) used to translate mission profiles into lab test parameters. - **Quantitative Methods:** Hands-on experience with FMEA/FMECA, Weibull analysis, and MTBF/MTTF modeling. - **Electromechanical Systems:** Experience working with motors, actuators, power electronics, or similar systems in a product going through active development. - **Communication:** Experience communicating reliability risk and recommendations to cross-functional engineering and program stakeholders. ## Bonus Points (The “Plus” List) - **Requirements Partnership:** Experience partnering with systems or requirements engineering to define mission profiles for a new or evolving product line, rather than only applying an inherited one. - **Industry Background:** Experience in automotive, EV, robotics, semiconductor, or consumer electronics reliability engineering. - **Founding Program Experience:** Experience standing up a reliability program or reliability requirements from scratch on an early-stage or prototype-phase product. - **Electronics Reliability:** Familiarity with low-voltage electronics, sensor, and power-electronics reliability, in addition to mechanical/structural fatigue and durability. - **Field Data:** Experience with field-reliability or warranty data analysis in addition to lab-based accelerated testing. - **Tooling:** Experience scripting or building tooling (Python or similar) for reliability data analysis and reporting.