Staff Reliability and Quality Engineer

THE POSITION

Saildrone is seeking a highly organized and passionate individual to join our quality engineering team. Reporting to the Manager, Quality Programs, the quality engineer will lead and participate in a wide variety of initiatives to ensure high product reliability and performance. This individual will play a key role in ensuring the world-class performance of the Saildrone’s autonomous surface vehicle and its production supply base. The ideal candidate will be intrinsically motivated, customer focused, detailed, team-oriented and have a drive for continuous improvement. 

THE RESPONSIBILITIES

• Monitor field performance across multiple drone platforms and identify emerging quality and reliability trends.
• Define, maintain, and report reliability KPIs suited to each product and customer use case, including MTBF, MTTF, failure rate, mean time to repair (MTTR), mission success rate, early-life failure rate, repeat failure rate, and reliability growth.
• Perform life-data and reliability analysis, including Weibull analysis, to understand failure behavior and product performance over time.
• Lead weekly field triage meetings to align teams on the most critical issues, set clear priorities, assign ownership, and turn insights into measurable actions that improve drone reliability.
• Conduct MRB meetings for returned hardware and determine appropriate disposition, including scrap, remanufacture/reuse, use-as-is, or return for further analysis
• Lead cross-functional RCA investigations including on returned hardware and drive CAPAs through closure.
• Partner with Technical Operations Support and Fleet Service to develop systems for tracking field failures, trends, customer usage, and overall reliability performance.
• Partner with Remanufacturing to develop and implement quality processes for the inspection, disposition, rework, and release of returned hardware.

THE QUALIFICATIONS

• Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field.
• 5 to 8+ years of hands-on quality engineering experience in a high-stakes, hardware-centric environment (e.g., Aerospace, Defense, Automotive, or Maritime/Robotics).
• OEM or T1 automotive, aerospace, maritime, or defense contractor experience.
• Hands-on experience troubleshooting, testing, and investigating electromechanical hardware.
• Experience defining and monitoring reliability KPIs for products operating in real-world customer environments.
• Experience applying quality and reliability methods to real-world product and field issues.
• Strong working knowledge of quality, root cause, and reliability methodologies, including 8D, FRACAS, FTA, and FMEA.
• Working knowledge of statistical and reliability analysis tools, including the ReliaSoft suite.
• Strong cross-functional communication skills with the ability to work across engineering, manufacturing, operations, service, and quality teams.
• Strong planning, organizational, analytical, negotiation, interpersonal, decision-making, oral, and written communication skills.
• Comfort with the ambiguity, rapid changes, and process evolution that comes in a start-up environment. The ability to create structure where none exists.

Bonus Qualifications

• Six Sigma, ASQ CRE/CQE, or other relevant quality/reliability certification.
• Technical or hands on knowledge of serial and network protocols (CAN, RS-485, RS-232, SPI, I2C, and TCP/IP).
• Comfortable with Linux OS and ability to understand Shells scripts.

PHYSICAL REQUIREMENTS

• Work requires the ability to be stationary for extended periods of time.
• Work requires the ability to transverse the manufacturing facility multiple times a day.
• Work requires the following motions: bending, twisting, squatting and reaching.
• Must be willing to travel 20% of the time.