Senior Staff Reliability Engineer

Countable Labs•Palo Alto, CA

About The Position

The Senior Staff Reliability Engineer is responsible for ensuring the successful and reliable development, launch, and life of the company’s instrumentation into the field. This role focuses on identifying and eliminating reliability risks across manufacturing, installation, and real-world use by working directly with the internal development team, contract manufacturers, suppliers, and customers. This is a highly hands-on role requiring regular field engagement, system installations, and close collaboration with design and development engineers to drive manufacturing and design improvements that ensure reliable performance at scale. Primary Focus Areas & Skills Field reliability and real-world system performance Manufacturing and supplier feedback loops Design and process changes to improve robustness End-to-end understanding of the product ecosystem Key skills: Systematic and data driven troubleshooting for complex systems Experience in running controlled failure experiments Analytics ability to develop run chart, reliability charts and performance metric charts Great communications cross functionally and with customers Experience in multiple disciplines of design - electrical, mechanical, fluidics, instrument control software (embedded and applications) Highly independent, can work on multiple priorities, organized, and proactive

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Mechatronics, Electrical, Systems Engineering, or related field
10+ years of experience in reliability, operations, manufacturing, field engineering, or systems engineering. You must have participated in multiple developments and new product introductions launches, and demonstrated a strong history of field robustness.
Hands-on experience with complex electromechanical systems (lasers, optics, PCBA, robotics preferred)
Proven ability to translate field issues into design or process improvements.
Comfortable working and communicating directly with customers, contract manufacturers, and suppliers
Willingness and ability to travel for field installations and CM support

Nice To Haves

Startup experience launching hardware products into the field
Experience in diagnostics tools, research use only tools, medical devices, robotics, or similar regulated products
Familiarity with structured problem-solving tools (FMEA, root cause analysis)
Experience supporting early production ramp and first-customer installs

Responsibilities

Actively participate in field installations to understand real-world use cases, environmental conditions, and customer workflows
Support field troubleshooting and early-life failure investigations
Capture field observations and translate them into actionable reliability, manufacturing, or design improvements
Serve as the technical bridge between field experience and engineering teams
Own reliability readiness for product launch and early field deployment
Identify reliability risks across hardware, software, manufacturing, installation, and usage
Lead root cause investigations for field and manufacturing issues at CMO
Drive corrective actions in collaboration with design and development engineers
Work directly with contract manufacturers to identify and resolve reliability and process issues
Review manufacturing processes for robustness and repeatability
Support supplier investigations related to component or subassembly reliability
Recommend process changes, inspection improvements, or supplier actions to prevent failures
Provide structured feedback to design and development engineers based on field and manufacturing learnings
Recommend design changes to improve reliability, serviceability, and manufacturability
Participate in design reviews with a reliability and field-use perspective
Support change implementation and validation related to reliability improvements
Support failure investigations, nonconformances, and corrective actions with technical rigor
Contribute to risk assessments and reliability-related documentation
Help define pragmatic reliability and quality processes suitable for a startup environment
Track and report reliability metrics such as field failures, early-life issues, and systemic risks