Reliability Engineer

About the role

Give hope. Give health. Make your mark in the fight against cancer.

At Accuray, we make a direct and powerful impact on the lives of cancer patients every day - helping them live longer, better lives. But our commitment to innovation offers a truly unique opportunity: the chance to change the fight against cancer - helping to develop, introduce and support new treatment delivery systems and software that will give new hope and new health to cancer patients and cancer survivors around the world.

Accuray develops, manufactures and sells radiotherapy systems for alternative cancer treatments. Our radiation therapy for cancer makes treatment shorter, safer, personalized and more effective, ultimately enabling patients to live longer, better lives.

Summary

The Reliability Systems Engineer in our Product Development department is responsible for establishing optimal reliability strategies across products and projects, identifying and tracking progress to relevant metrics, and guiding subsystem and component owners in execution of the most beneficial reliability tools throughout the product development process.

Reporting To/department

Reports to the Sr. Director of Electromechanical Systems in the Electromechanical Engineering department.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities

• Develop user and system-level product reliability requirements to enable achievement of customer and business reliability objectives; work with subsystem owners and subject matter experts to allocate those requirements to subsystem and component levels; provide guidance and implement strategies to verify those requirements; adapt strategies to address needs of both internal and sourced designs to ensure products/components meet or exceed functional requirements over their intended life in their intended environment.
• Translate user and system-level objectives into system and project-specific reliability plans; provide guidance to subsystem and component owners to create similar plans at those levels.
• Employ tools to identify and prioritize design risks and define mitigations to eliminate or reduce those risks as early as possible in the development cycle; tools include but are not limited to FMEAs, usage definition, evaluation with respect to anticipated stresses, and field data analysis.
• Identify design analysis and other (non-test-based) strategies to mitigate design risks and enable requirement verification; applicable tools include but are not limited to de-rating, reliability prediction, modeling, and finite element analysis.
• Provide guidance on test strategies to achieve reliability objectives, not limited to but including reliability growth testing (e.g. HALT/step stress testing), mitigation of design risks (e.g. environmental testing), and reliability demonstration testing.
• Analyze and mentor other engineers in analysis techniques to characterize failure distributions, identify and mitigate dominant failure modes.
• Track progress to reliability objectives through the development cycle; facilitate regular review of progress to objectives and mitigations to address anticipated and known failure modes; provide guidance to organizations including service, manufacturing, and quality to enable achievement of reliability objectives on released product.
• Mentor subsystem and component owners in identification and execution of the most beneficial reliability tools during the optimal time in the product development process.
• Identify and work with cross-functional teams to implement process changes to drive reliability into existing processes and create new processes, when necessary; promote use of reliability best practices within and beyond product development based on external input not limited to but including standards and industry best practices.
• Support functional and project managers in establishing and updating project milestones and schedules as well as evaluating engineering technologies and tools.
• Work effectively with other engineers, scientists, subcontractors, and contractors.

Preferred or Desired

• An advanced technical degree or certification in the field of Reliability Engineering.
• Experience with reliability analysis software.
• Experience in application of statistical methods.
• Knowledge of reliability tools such as FMEA, Weibull Analysis, Reliability Allocation and Prediction, De-rating, Root Cause Analysis, Ishikawa Diagrams, Pareto Analysis, DOE, and accelerated testing.
• Experience in application of reliability methodologies across the product development cycle.
• Experience in software-based test automation including Python.

Required

• Bachelor's degree in Engineering or Physics and at least 5 years of design and development or reliability in a highly regulated industry.
• Suitable work experience in a technically related field may be considered in lieu of formal education.
• Basic understanding of control systems, electronics, and computer networks.
• Hands-on experience with electronic test equipment and software.
• Excellent troubleshooting and problem-solving skills.
• Good verbal and written communication skills.
• Proficient computer skills, including standard office software.
• Ability to organize and coordinate technical tasks for other engineers.

Additional information

To qualify for this position, candidates must be able to furnish proof that they are authorized to work in the country they are applying on a permanent basis without sponsorship.