Reliability Test Engineer

About the role

You will own reliability and qualification testing across insectoid hardware. Your scope includes test strategy, load and environment definition, instrumentation, fixtures, accelerated-life methods, failure analysis, acceptance criteria, and release evidence from components through integrated machines.

You will build tests that expose failure mechanisms early, reproduce field conditions, and convert every failure into a quantitative design or process decision. Success means critical failure modes have stated limits, representative tests, traceable results, and verified corrective actions—and that measured improvements can be distinguished from test artifacts or uncontrolled configuration changes.

What you will do

• Translate operating loads, environmental exposure, duty cycles, and hazard analyses into component, subsystem, and integrated-machine test requirements.

• Design and commission instrumented fixtures for load, cycle, thermal, vibration, impact, contamination, ingress, wear, and combined-environment testing.

• Build qualification and acceptance plans with explicit sample rationale, failure criteria, margins, configuration control, and data-retention requirements.

• Develop accelerated-life tests grounded in a defensible failure mechanism and correlate them against representative operation.

• Lead failure investigations using physical evidence, telemetry, teardown, metrology, and controlled reproduction.

• Drive corrective action from containment and root cause through verified design, material, process, or supplier correction.

• Maintain reliability models, failure-mode registers, test reports, and release evidence that remain traceable across machine revisions.

Minimum qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in mechanical, electrical, materials, aerospace, or reliability engineering, or equivalent practical experience developing reliability, qualification, environmental, or structural tests for physical hardware.

• Direct ownership of an instrumented test system, including load definition, fixture design, sensor selection, data acquisition, uncertainty, correlation, and controlled technical reporting in Python, MATLAB, or an equivalent environment.

• Working knowledge of fatigue, fracture, wear, thermal behavior, vibration, statistics, and accelerated-life test design.

• Demonstrated failure investigation that identified a physical root cause and closed with a verified design or process correction.

• Ability to read CAD, drawings, tolerances, specifications, and bills of material well enough to challenge a test article's configuration.

Preferred experience

• Robotics, aerospace, automotive, industrial equipment, or other mobile electromechanical systems.

• HALT, HASS, fatigue rigs, environmental chambers, shaker systems, ingress testing, or field-to-lab correlation.

• Reliability growth, Weibull analysis, design of experiments, fault-tree analysis, or supplier qualification.

Compensation

The annual base salary range for this El Segundo position is $145,000–$185,000. An offer within this range will reflect the position's approved scope and the candidate's demonstrated role-relevant skills and experience.

Working at GRAM

This on-site El Segundo role spends substantial time with physical hardware, instrumented fixtures, and failure teardowns. You will own test safety and carry failures from controlled reproduction through verified closure.