Manager Hardware Reliability Engineer Jobs in Washington, DC

Quartermaster is building a live, real-time picture of the world's oceans. Our distributed sensor network turns ordinary civil and commercial vessels into intelligent nodes, delivering HD video, signal intelligence, and AI-powered insights that help coast guards, navies, insurers, energy operators, and researchers monitor, detect, and respond across global waters.

At the center of the network is SmartMast™ - a ruggedized, vessel-mounted sensor package that installs on any vessel over 20 GT. Each unit combines a 360°/31x optical and infrared camera array (IP68-rated), dual software-defined radios, an onboard AI compute module, a configurable powerpack, and resilient global SATCOM that pushes data to users anywhere in under five seconds. We have deployed 600+ sensors across more than 25 countries, and our fleet has traveled over 10 million nautical miles.

As the fleet scales, keeping every deployed SmartMast healthy, connected, and producing reliable data at sea is mission-critical. We are hiring our first dedicated Fleet Reliability Engineer to own that outcome.

The Fleet Reliability Engineer owns the health, uptime, and long-term reliability of our deployed SmartMast hardware fleet. You will be the person who knows - at any moment - how many units are online, which are degrading, why units fail, and what we are doing about it. You will turn fleet telemetry into action: catching failures before they take a unit offline, driving root-cause analysis on the ones that slip through, and closing the loop with hardware design, firmware, and field-service teams so the same failure never recurs.

This is a hands-on, high-ownership role suited to a senior engineer who is comfortable operating at the intersection of hardware, embedded systems, data, and harsh-environment field operations. You will build the reliability program from the ground up: the metrics, the monitoring, the failure-tracking process, and the maintenance and RMA workflows that let the fleet scale from hundreds to thousands of units.

• Own fleet-wide reliability metrics - uptime, availability, MTBF, MTTR, data-yield, and failure rates by component and by deployment environment - and report them to engineering and leadership.

• Build and refine dashboards, alerting, and telemetry pipelines that surface degrading units (power, thermal, connectivity, camera, radio, compute) before they go offline.

• Define what "healthy" means for each subsystem and set the thresholds that trigger proactive intervention.

• Lead root-cause analysis (RCA) on field failures, from telemetry forensics through physical teardown of returned units.

• Maintain the fleet failure database and drive FMEA, reliability growth tracking, and corrective/preventive action (CAPA) to closure.

• Close the loop with hardware, firmware, and manufacturing teams - translating field failures into design-for-reliability, component-selection, and firmware changes.

• Define preventive maintenance schedules, spares strategy, and the RMA / repair-and-return process for a globally distributed fleet.

• Update installation, diagnostic, and field-repair procedures and troubleshooting guides used by internal technicians and partner crews.

• Support field deployments and complex repairs directly, including periodic travel to vessels, ports, and installation sites.

• Work with the hardware team to establish environmental and life-test protocols (vibration, salt-fog/corrosion, thermal, ingress, power) to qualify hardware and predict field life before deployment.

• Feed reliability requirements and acceptance criteria into new hardware revisions and supplier qualification.

• Design the reliability processes and tooling so they scale as the fleet grows into the thousands of units.

• Bachelor's degree in Electrical, Mechanical, Systems, Reliability, or a related engineering discipline - or equivalent hands-on experience.

• 5+ years of engineering experience with deployed electro-mechanical hardware, at least 2 of which are in reliability, sustaining/field engineering, or hardware operations for a fielded product.

• Demonstrated ownership of hardware reliability outcomes for a fleet or installed base - you have been directly responsible for uptime, failure rates, or MTBF/MTTR of real hardware in the field.

• Hands-on proficiency with root-cause analysis methods (8D, 5-Whys, fishbone) and reliability tools such as FMEA, fault-tree analysis, and CAPA.

• Practical experience diagnosing electro-mechanical systems using telemetry/logs, bench instruments, and physical teardown.

• Data fluency: able to query, analyze, and visualize fleet telemetry using SQL and Python (or equivalent) to find trends and drive decisions.

• Working knowledge of electronics, power systems, and mechanical enclosures, and the failure modes of hardware operating in harsh outdoor environments.

• Willingness and ability to travel periodically to field sites (vessels, ports, installation locations), including occasional international travel.

• Must be legally authorized to work in the United States and able to satisfy any customer-or contract-driven eligibility requirements associated with government and maritime-security work.

• Experience with hardware deployed in marine, maritime, offshore, automotive, aerospace/defense, satellite, telecom, or other remote-harsh-environment fleets.

• Familiarity with IP-rated enclosures, corrosion and salt-fog effects, marine power systems, and environmental qualification (e.g., IEC 60529, MIL-STD-810, IEC 60068).

• Experience with connected/IoT or edge devices: remote diagnostics, OTA firmware updates, and interpreting embedded-system and connectivity (SATCOM/cellular) telemetry.

• Exposure to camera/optical systems, RF/software-defined radios, batteries, or edge-AI compute hardware.

• Background building a reliability or sustaining-engineering function from scratch at a hardware startup or scaling operation.

• ASQ Certified Reliability Engineer (CRE) or comparable credential.

• Fleet uptime and data-yield are measured, trending up, and visible to the whole company.

• Failures are caught proactively from telemetry rather than reported by customers.

• Every significant field failure has a documented root cause and a closed corrective action.

• Reliability feedback is shaping each new SmartMast hardware revision, and the reliability program scales cleanly as the fleet grows.

You will build the reliability backbone of a fast-growing maritime intelligence network and see your work sail across the world's oceans. Our leadership brings deep experience across the Navy, DARPA, Anduril, and Scale AI, and we are backed to scale a fleet that is already operating in 25+ countries. If you want to own hardware reliability end-to-end and watch your impact compound with every vessel that joins the network, we would like to talk.