Staff Reliability and Maintainability Engineer (R5301)

Shield AI is a venture-backed defense-tech company with the mission of protecting service members and civilians with intelligent systems. Its products include Hivemind autonomy software, V-BAT and X-BAT aircraft, and Aechelon simulation and synthetic reality technologies. With offices and facilities across the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific, Shield AI’s technology actively supports operations worldwide. For more information, visit www.shield.ai. Follow Shield AI on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and YouTube.

What you'll do:: Lead engineering investigations for V-BAT field failures, repeat defects, reliability issues, maintainability issues, and complex technical escalations. Drive Root Cause and Corrective Action investigations for fielded V-BAT issues, including containment, root cause identification, corrective action planning, verification, and closure. Reproduce and analyze field issues using logs, returned hardware, test data, maintenance records, operational context, configuration data, environmental conditions, and customer-reported symptoms. Partner with Fleet Support Engineers, Product Engineering, Quality, Manufacturing, Reliability Data Engineering, Supply Chain, and Operations to investigate and resolve fielded system issues. Determine whether issues are caused by design, manufacturing, supplier quality, configuration, software, operator use, environmental exposure, maintenance practices, documentation gaps, or system integration effects. Lead or support returned material analysis, teardown reviews, bench testing, inspection planning, fault isolation, and failure replication activities. Document failure modes, root cause, contributing factors, containment actions, corrective actions, verification plans, and recurrence-prevention measures. Drive corrective actions through closure by ensuring actions have owners, due dates, verification methods, and measurable field-improvement outcomes. Identify reliability and maintainability trends from field failures, repeat defects, maintenance data, test results, and product health indicators. Recommend new tests, inspections, diagnostics, design changes, process changes, maintenance updates, or supplier quality actions to prevent recurrence. Provide technical input to product health reviews, reliability readouts, sustainment reviews, fleet readiness assessments, and leadership updates. Support development and improvement of R&M processes, including field failure review, FRACAS, RCCA, reliability growth tracking, maintai