Staff Reliability Engineer

The Company

SPAN develops products that accelerate the rapid adoption of renewable energy in the home. The flagship SPAN Smart Panel is the first true evolution for the traditional home electric panel, harnessing enhanced technology for metering, monitoring, and control. An expanded product suite of intelligent, integrated solutions radically lowers the cost and complexity of energy upgrades–including solar, batteries and EVs–empowering homeowners to be active, resilient and informed players in the energy market. 

The Role

Span is seeking an experienced and driven electrical engineer to lead the reliability program for Span through all stages of development. In this role, you will rely on your past experience to develop a comprehensive reliability test program for new products and support any reliability issues that arise in the field. You will work with the electrical, mechanical, and systems teams to implement test plans, build out our in-house testing capabilities, and work with outside labs as needed. As the company grows, you will build out and manage our reliability team.

In this role, you will:

• Own Span’s DFR (Design for Reliability), determine appropriate reliability targets, develop usage models, create DFMEA, test specs, test planning and reliability plan for the Span panel, Span Drive, and future products.

• Determine test strategies that optimize for product reliability, DFMEA-based risk mitigations, test team resources, and program schedules.

• Work with Engineers to develop test plans.

• Operate tests using Linux command line and use basic Python coding to support test logging and data analysis and presentation.

• Conduct testing in areas including the validation of material properties, design structure, thermal performance, ingress performance, antenna performance, and electrical safety.

• Collaborate with internal and external teams to design and execute product and component level reliability testing including hands on testing with real hardware.

• Conduct test data analysis, clearly communicate test results, and collaborate with design engineers to resolve issues detected in testing.

• Own the build out of our in-house reliability lab, you will procure and develop test equipment to support testing on our current and future products.

• Build and mentor the hardware reliability engineering team.

• Manage relationships with 3rd party testing facilities.

About You

Required Qualifications

We are seeking a seasoned reliability engineer who has:

• BS or MS in Mechanical or Electrical Engineering (or related field)

• 8+ years experience developing and running reliability tests including environmental, mechanical, and electrical stress testing.

• Experience with analysis of test results including statistical analysis techniques.

• Experience with scripting languages, particularly Python

• Hands-on approach whether it be building a prototype or performing testing.

• Hands-on experience building test setups and using instrumentation

• Ability to understand and discuss the electromagnetism, electronics, and material physics fundamentals underlying hardware reliability and safety

Bonus Qualifications

We would love to hire someone who has:

• Experience leading projects with a diverse team under tight timelines.

• Experience working safely with high voltage equipment (up to 600-1000V).

• Experience working with and testing AC and/or DC power systems.

• Knowledge of national and international safety and regulatory requirements such as UL, National Electric Code (NEC), IEC, and ISO.

• Experience with root cause analysis (RCA) of field failures.

The U.S. base salary range for this position is $140,000 - $190,000 plus benefits, equity and variable compensation for Sales-related roles. This range represents SPAN’s good faith estimate of competitively-priced salary for the role based on national, real-time industry data from companies of a similar growth stage. This range reflects minimum and maximum new hire salaries for the role across US locations. Within the range, individual pay is determined by location and individual factors including relevant skills, experience and education or training. This range correlates to the relative level of the candidate we believe we need for the role and may require an adjustment for candidates of a different level. 

Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for the location this role is based during the hiring process.