What are the responsibilities and job description for the Senior Reliability Engineer (Power Electronics) position at Acara Solutions, An Aleron Company?
Job Title: Senior Reliability Engineer - Power Electronics
Location: Milwaukee, WI
Employment Type: Salaried direct employee with comprehensive benefits
Industry: Power Electronics
Compensation: Open
About the Opportunity:
We are seeking a hands-on Senior Reliability Engineer to establish and execute reliability strategies for advanced power electronics, industrial drives, motor controls, regenerative power conversion systems, battery test equipment, and EV powertrain test systems. Company's products include high-power and high-voltage systems used for battery cycling, battery emulation, inverter and motor testing, energy storage, variable frequency drives (VFDs), dynamometer test rigs, and industrial applications.
Ideal Candidate
The ideal candidate is a front-end engineer, strong in failure analysis, that combines strong mathematical and statistical capabilities with practical knowledge of power electronics and laboratory reliability testing. This individual can convert product requirements and operating conditions into defensible reliability models, effective test programs, and actionable engineering recommendations while maintaining a hands-on connection to physical testing and failure analysis.
What You'll Do:
- Develop product and component reliability requirements, plans, test strategies, and acceptance criteria.
- Select and specify appropriate reliability tests based on product architecture, component technologies, use conditions, failure mechanisms, and business risk.
- Design accelerated life, endurance, environmental, thermal cycling, power cycling, highly accelerated life testing, and reliability demonstration programs.
- Provide hands-on setup, monitoring, data review, and technical oversight of testing performed in Unico's laboratory.
- Define statements of work and provide technical oversight for testing conducted by third-party laboratories.
- Develop mission profiles, reliability block diagrams, component stress analyses, life predictions, and system-level reliability models.
- Perform detailed reliability predictions using Telcordia SR-332 and other recognized industry methods to estimate electronic equipment failure rates and support system availability and downtime modeling.
- Apply statistical methods including Weibull analysis, life-data analysis, accelerated life-test modeling, confidence bounds, probability distributions, and reliability demonstration planning.
- Analyze laboratory, manufacturing, warranty, and field-return data to estimate useful life, failure rates, MTBF, confidence levels, and reliability growth.
- Coordinate failure analysis, including investigation planning, evidence preservation, external laboratory support, root-cause determination, and corrective-action verification.
- Facilitate FMEA activities and identify critical components, design weaknesses, dominant failure mechanisms, and reliability risks.
- Work with Product Development, Validation, Compliance, Quality, Manufacturing, and Supply Chain teams to improve product robustness.
- Support component qualification, supplier evaluation, derating guidelines, design reviews, and prototype-to-production transitions.
- Prepare clear technical reports and communicate reliability risks, assumptions, results, and recommendations to engineering and business stakeholders.
What You'll Bring:
- B.S. in Electrical Engineering, Reliability Engineering, Applied Statistics, or a closely related discipline to power electronics.
- Minimum 5 years of experience in reliability engineering of electronics or semiconductors, preferably power electronics, including the following:
- Demonstrated experience developing reliability test plans and applying statistical methods to electronic or power electronic products.
- Strong knowledge of power semiconductor, capacitor, magnetics, PCB, connector, cooling-system, sheet-metal fatigue and corrosion, and electromechanical failure mechanisms.
- Advanced competency in statistical analysis, life-data modeling, reliability prediction, and technical data interpretation.
- Experience coordinating structured failure analysis and root-cause investigations.
- Ability to work safely around high-power electrical equipment, including systems operating at up to 690 Vac three-phase and 2000 Vdc.