Director, Reliability Engineering

About the Company

Mainspring Energy manufactures and delivers fuel-flexible, low-emissions local power solutions that rapidly add new capacity and deliver reliable, affordable, and sustainable electric power. The company began commercial shipments of its Mainspring Linear Generators in 2020 and today has hundreds of megawatts in advanced development and field operations for leading Fortune 500 companies, data centers, and utilities. Mainspring partners with global energy leaders including AEP, NextEra Energy Resources, and Schneider Electric.

The core values that ground our work, guide our decisions, and connect us together: Pragmatic Optimism, Excellence without Ego, and Proactive Collaboration.

About the Role

Mainspring Energy is growing rapidly and has begun to manufacture its Linear Generators in volume. We're looking for a reliability engineering leader to build and run the function that evaluates design risk and quantifies and reduces it to acceptable levels for our target markets. In this role, you'll own the reliability strategy and roadmap, build and develop a team of reliability engineers, and act as the senior voice for reliability across Product Engineering, R&D, and Manufacturing.

Responsibilities

• Directly lead the team responsible for reliability testing including mechanical stress tests, shock, vibration, and environmental testing.
• Build, lead, and grow a team of reliability engineers, setting hiring plans, org structure, and career development paths as the team scales with production volume.
• Own the reliability roadmap and testing strategy across the product lifecycle, from design risk assessment through field performance, balancing rigor against Mainspring's fast product cadence.
• Partner with the test engineering team to define and track reliability testing performed on linear generators.
• Define and track reliability metrics and goals (e.g., MTBF, values at risk, warranty/field return trends) and report program health and risk posture to senior engineering and business leadership.
• Establish and continuously improve reliability processes and standards — FMEA, HALT, root-cause methodology, CAPA — as scalable, repeatable systems.
• Serve as the senior reliability partner to Product Engineering, R&D, and Manufacturing leadership, influencing design decisions and trade-offs at the architecture and program level.
• Lead cross-functional FMEA efforts for design, process, and maintenance, ensuring the right stakeholders are engaged and risk decisions are made and documented.
• Represent reliability in design reviews, program gate reviews, and executive updates, translating technical risk into business-relevant terms.
• Guide cross-functional teams on compliance-relevant design decisions (UL, NFPA, IEC) for electrical and fuel system components, ensuring reliability considerations are built in early.
• Maintain technical depth to review and challenge test plans, failure analyses, and root-cause investigations led by the team.
• Ensure verification test plans are grounded in system/sub-system specs and industry-standard protocols.
• Champion investment in test infrastructure, automation, and data analysis capability to keep pace with rapid cycles of learning.

Qualifications

• Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or related field.
• 10+ years of experience in reliability, test, or quality engineering for mechanical, electrical, or electromechanical systems, including 3+ years in a formal people-management role.
• Demonstrated experience building or significantly scaling a reliability, quality, or test engineering team in a hardware/manufacturing environment.
• Deep, hands-on background in FMEA, HALT, root-cause analysis, and CAPA processes (RCA, 8D), with the credibility to coach others and set standards.
• Track record of influencing design and engineering decisions at the cross-functional/leadership level.
• Strong communication skills, with experience presenting reliability risk and program status to senior/executive stakeholders.
• Comfortable operating in a fast-paced, evolving environment where systems, processes, and team structure are still being built.

Preferred Experience

• Experience in hardware or energy/industrial equipment manufacturing, ideally at a company scaling from low-volume to high-volume production.
• Understanding of electrical system concepts, HV/LV electronics reliability, and failure characterization techniques (X-ray, CT, cross-sectioning, optical microscopy).
• Experience with compliance testing and standards (UL, IEC, NFPA).
• Familiarity with data analysis and reliability statistics tooling (Python, MATLAB, Weibull++, JMP) sufficient to guide and review team output.

Pay

The salary will be adjusted to reflect local market conditions based on employee location as well as the experience of the employee. Along with the base salary, Mainspring offers pre-IPO stock options and benefits.

Schedule

This position is a hybrid role (onsite + remote) at our Menlo Park HQ.