Lead Reliability Engineer

About the Role

You will be the founding reliability engineering hire, owning whether our product survives in the field. Our wearable goes onto people's heads for hours a day. It charges over USB-C, lives in pockets and bags, gets sweated on, dropped, and travels through every climate. Your job is to make sure it works, keeps working, and meets every safety, regulatory, and quality bar that consumer electronics require.

You will report to the Head of Hardware, with regular exposure to the CEO and CTO, and partner closely with the EE, FW, audio, camera, and product design leads. Each owns their subsystem; you own the qualification, certification, and field-quality strategy across all of them. You will also work extensively with external engineering teams at our contract manufacturers, test labs, and certification bodies. The work is outsourced; the accountability is yours

What You’ll Do

• Own the reliability strategy end-to-end: test plans, qualification protocols, accelerated life testing, and certifications across all subsystems and regions.
• Drive design-for-reliability into every team's process: leading FMEA reviews, design-review participation, and the cultural work of building reliability in rather than testing it after.
• Define and execute the qualification test program: environmental, mechanical, wireless, battery, and biocompatibility for skin-contact components.
• Stand up our test capability, internal where it makes sense and external lab partnerships where it doesn't, and own the test fixtures, sample plans, and pass/fail criteria that gate every release.
• Lead the certifications strategy and execution: FCC, CE/RED, IC, RoHS, REACH, plus body-worn and battery-specific approvals, alongside our regulatory consultants and CMs.
• Partner with the EE lead on EMC and ESD; with audio and camera leads on component-level reliability; with the product design lead on drop, ingress, and thermal robustness; with the firmware lead on field telemetry and diagnostics.
• Take the product through qualification gates to in-market launch by end of year.
• Own field quality post-launch: AFR/MTBF targets, returns analysis, root-cause investigation, and the corrective-action loop into design.
• Build and lead the reliability function as the product scales.

Must-Haves

• 10+ years of reliability engineering for consumer hardware, with at least one shipped product where you owned reliability from concept through field.
• Deep working knowledge of consumer-electronics qualification standards (IEC 60068, IEC 61000, JEDEC, IPC) and the regional certifications landscape (FCC Part 15, CE/RED, IC RSS, plus battery and body-worn specifics).
• Experience designing accelerated life tests and applying statistical reliability methods (Weibull analysis, acceleration models, sample-size design).
• Demonstrated experience driving design-for-reliability with EE, ME, and FW leads: FMEA leadership, design reviews, and embedding reliability discipline upstream.
• Comfortable owning external lab relationships, certification projects, and CM-side reliability gates.

Nice-to-Haves

• Wearables, hearables, mobile devices, or other body-worn consumer electronics.
• Battery reliability: UN38.3, cycle life, swelling, thermal abuse, charging-system safety.
• Biocompatibility and skin-contact testing (ISO 10993 family).
• Field telemetry and post-launch quality analytics. * HALT/HASS test design and execution.

Additional information

If you’re excited about this role but don’t meet every qualification, please apply. As we build, we’re hiring for complementary strengths to form a high-impact team.

Compensation & Benefits

• Competitive base salary
• Meaningful equity package
• 401(k) with company matching
• Health insurance
• Flexible PTO

Our Hiring Timeline

• Evaluation completed within 14 days of first interview
• Offer letter dispatched same day as go decision, valid for 10 days
• Start date within 4 weeks of offer acceptance
• All candidate queries responded to within 3 hours during business hours