We are seeking a Reliability Manager to join our team. In this role, you will be building a reliability program in Brazil to support local and Latin American product development and product lifecycle management from a reliability perspective. You will be responsible for product reliability and for understanding, quantifying, and communicating the risks associated with new product development and product management change.

Core functions:

• Risk Analysis & Assessment: Apply first principles approach to determining risk and impact. Organize brainstorming sessions with key stakeholders for quick risk discovery. Oversee Design Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (DFMEA) sessions during the concept and design phase to help identify failure modes specific solar tracker systems and prioritize mitigation strategies.

• Reliability Test Planning: With support from the Reliability group in the USA, develop reliability test plans for products being designed and/or maintained in Brazil and Latin America. Work with the internal and external test labs and outdoor solar testing fields to execute long term reliability tests for solar tracker products at component and system levels.

• Reliability Testing and Reporting: In conjunction with the Reliability group in the USA, collaborate with engineering and test teams to give input on test equipment, custom test jigs, data acquisition systems, and test instrumentation to ensure accurate and consistent results. You will be responsible for owning and reporting all internal durability test data and results through standardized report formats that can act as collateral for customers.

• Failure Analysis: Accountable for driving failure analysis based on internal reliability testing as well as for field failures. Collaborate with suppliers and customers to drive root cause analysis and take them to closure. Specify environmental and reliability tests needed to recreate failure modes. Co-ordinate with internal and external labs to scope out appropriate FA methodologies and interpret results and communicate recommendations.

• Collaboration: Collaborate with Design, Manufacturing and Asset Management teams to implement and communicate design improvements based on test and field data. Collaborate with the Quality team to drive root cause corrective actions and re-create failure modes through testing. Collaborate with Suppliers to specify reliability testing and review reliability test reports.

• Modeling & Analysis: Establish system for reliability growth of new product development to quantify product maturation during and through long duration reliability tests, system level validation and field pilot trials.

Additionally, the candidate is expected to have a good understanding of:

• Knowledge of design for reliability (DfR) activities to incorporate reliability into early design phases. Experience with material selection, derating, redundancy and tolerance stack up analysis.

• Relationship between use-case and accelerated test conditions based on a physics of failure approach for electromechanical components.

• Fatigue and wear type failure modes in rotating and load bearing components and moving parts. Corrosion and vibration related failure modes in metallic structures and assemblies. Overload and yield failures in steel weldments and joints.

• Reliability Growth Models like Duane or Crow-AMSAA to track reliability improvements over iterative testing and field pilots. Closed loop learning tools like FRACAS (Failure Reporting, Analysis and Corrective Action System) to drive corrective actions and improvements.

• IEC, ASTM, ISO and ANSI standards related to environmental testing including but not limited to corrosion

Qualifications:

Bachelor’s (Mechanical, Structural, Materials or relevant), xx yrs experience. Master’s (Mechanical, Structural, Materials or relevant) preferred with xx yrs experience.

• Experience with reliability tools and methodologies like FMEA, Fault Tree Analysis, Accelerated Life Testing, 8D Root Cause Analysis, Weibull Analysis, JMP, ReliaSoft

• Hands-on experience with fatigue, vibration, corrosion, load and thermal cycling type testing. Understanding of finite element analysis (FEA) and failure modeling for stress and fatigue predictions.

• Experience working with environmental chambers, dynamometers, strain gauges, torque sensors, displacement transducers, pressure sensors and data acquisition systems.