Reliability Engineering Lead

About the role

Heron Power is a startup building cutting‑edge power electronics for the 21st‑century grid, aiming to debottleneck electricity generation and consumption with scalable, innovative, and lower‑cost hardware solutions that accelerate the electrification of everything. The company’s first goal is to build better converters (inverters & rectifiers) to connect large‑scale renewables, storage, and loads to the grid. Led by seasoned veterans who have designed and shipped gigawatts of power conversion products, Heron Power fosters a collaborative, enriching environment where everyone learns together. You can expect to work in a dynamic and collaborative environment, driven by first principles engineering, solving difficult problems. Reliability is at the core of everything they design; they stand behind products with a full lifetime warranty across all applications, a commitment that only holds if reliability is engineered in from first principles.

Responsibilities

• Define product reliability requirements, balancing target reliability and failure‑rate metrics against cost, schedule, and manufacturability constraints.
• Set reliability strategy and goals at the corporate level, aligning engineering, product, and manufacturing teams around shared reliability targets and roadmaps.
• Apply Physics of Failure (PoF) and Design for Reliability (DFR) principles throughout the product development lifecycle, identifying dominant failure mechanisms early and driving design decisions that mitigate them before hardware exists.
• Derive mission profiles from real‑world use conditions and translate them into accelerated life test (ALT) calculations—acceleration factors, sample size, and test duration.
• Build and maintain reliability models (Weibull/lifetime distributions, FMEA, fault tree analysis) to predict failure modes and quantify confidence levels for design decisions.
• Own field reliability strategy, closing the loop between field return/failure data and design, test, and mission‑profile assumptions.
• Partner with Product and Commercial teams to define warranty terms, translating the full lifetime warranty commitment into concrete design targets.
• Own the lifecycle cost as a design attribute—driving decisions on service, repair, and system architecture that keep products highly available and cost‑effective to operate over decades, beating the competition on lifetime cost of ownership.
• Partner directly with Electrical, Mechanical, and Firmware/Software engineering teams, as well as the Quality organization, to ensure reliability is designed in at the component and system level.
• Mentor and potentially lead a team of reliability engineers, setting technical direction and reviewing mission‑profile derivations, ALT plans, and findings.

What Makes This Role Different

This is a strategy‑setting role, not just an execution role—you define reliability requirements and set corporate‑level goals rather than apply an existing process. You’ll have the challenge to build and scale a reliability engineering function