Reliability and Maintainability Engineer (R5301)

Shield AI is a venture-backed defense-tech company with the mission of protecting service members and civilians with intelligent systems. Its products include Hivemind autonomy software, V-BAT and X-BAT aircraft, and Aechelon simulation and synthetic reality technologies. With offices and facilities across the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific, Shield AI’s technology actively supports operations worldwide. For more information, visit www.shield.ai https://shield.ai/. Follow Shield AI on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/shield-ai, X https://x.com/shieldaitech, Instagram https://www.instagram.com/shield_ai, and YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@Shield_AI. JOB DESCRIPTION: The Reliability and Maintainability Engineer is a senior-level individual contributor responsible for driving investigation, root cause analysis, corrective action, and reliability improvement for V-BAT field failures, repeat defects, and complex technical issues requiring deeper engineering analysis.This role owns the technical investigation path for fielded V-BAT issues by using logs, returned hardware, test data, maintenance records, operational context, configuration data, and fleet trends to determine failure modes, root causes, contributing factors, and corrective actions. The Reliability and Maintainability Engineer partners closely with Fleet Support Engineering, Product Engineering, Quality, Manufacturing, Reliability Data Engineering, Supply Chain, and Operations to ensure field failures are understood, contained, corrected, and prevented from recurring.This role is accountable for translating field issues into structured technical investigations, verified corrective actions, reliability improvements, maintainability improvements, and clear product health insights that improve fleet readiness, customer support, and long-term system performance. What you'll do: - - Lead engineering investigations for V-BAT field failures, repeat defects, reliability issues, maintainability issues, and complex technical escalations. - Drive Root Cause and Corrective Action investigations for fielded V-BAT issues, including containment, root cause identification, corrective action planning, verification, and closure. - Reproduce and analyze field issues using logs, returned hardware, test data, maintenance records, operational context, configuration data, environmental conditions, and customer-reported symptoms. - Partner with Fleet Support Engineers, Product Engineering, Quality, Manufacturing, Reliability Data Engineering, Supply Chain, and Operations to investigate and resolve fielded system issues. - Determine whether issues are caused by design, manufacturing, supplier quality, configuration, software, operator use, environmental exposure, maintenance practices, documentation gaps, or system integration effects. - Lead and support returned material analysis, teardown reviews, bench testing, inspection planning, fault isolation, and failure replication activities. - Document failure modes, root cause, contributing factors, containment actions, corrective actions, verification plans, and recurrence-prevention measures. - Drive corrective actions through closure by ensuring actions have owners, due dates, verification methods, and measurable field-improvement outcomes. - Identify reliability and maintainability trends from field failures, repeat defects, maintenance data, test results, and product health indicators. - Recommend new tests, inspections, diagnostics, design changes, process changes, maintenance updates, or supplier quality actions to prevent recurrence. - Provide technical input to product health reviews, reliability readouts, sustainment reviews, fleet readiness assessments, and leadership updates. - Support development and improvement of R&M processes, including field failure review, FRACAS, RCCA, reliability growth tracking, maintainability feedback loops, and corrective action management. - Work with Product Engineering to ensure field-failure findings are translated into design improvements, retrofit plans, software updates, service actions, or configuration changes where appropriate. - Work with Quality and Manufacturing to determine whether failures are linked to process escapes, inspection gaps, workmanship issues, supplier defects, or production variation. - Work with Fleet Support and Operations to understand operational impact, maintenance burden, customer effects, and urgency of fielded system issues. - Provide clear technical recommendations on containment, inspection, repair, replacement, retrofit, service guidance, or fleet-level mitigation. - Communicate investigation findings, risks, corrective actions, and verification status clearly to technical teams, sustainment leadership, and cross-functional stakeholders. - Support X-BAT lessons learned where V-BAT reliability, maintainability, and field-failure experience can inform future design, sustainment, diagnostics, repairability, and lifecycle planning. Required qualifications: - - Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Systems Engineering, Reliability Engineering, or a related technical discipline, or equivalent practical experience. - 4+ years of experience in reliability engineering, maintainability engineering, failure analysis, systems engineering, quality engineering, aviation sustainment, product support, manufacturing engineering, or complex hardware sustainment. - Demonstrated experience conducting technical investigations for field failures, repeat defects, hardware issues, system-level issues, or complex product performance problems. - Experience driving Root Cause and Corrective Action investigations from initial problem statement through containment, root cause, corrective action, verification, and closure. - Strong ability to analyze hardware, software behavior, logs, test data, returned material, field reports, configuration history, mai