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Salary: USD 182,000 - 231,000 / annual
Atoms is building Physical AI—real-world robots for industries including food, mining, and transport. The company integrates hardware, software, AI, operations, and manufacturing to deploy autonomous systems into real-world environments at scale.
As Senior Hardware Reliability Engineer, you will own vehicle-level reliability testing and hardware issue resolution for the on-road program. This is a hands-on role based in the garage, on the road, and at test sites and labs.
Key responsibilities:
- Run a dedicated test fleet: define duty cycles, routes, mileage and hour targets; schedule vehicles and drivers with operations; track exposure by vehicle and hardware revision.
- Plan and execute durability and environmental testing on the road and at external test labs to reproduce field conditions.
- Own highest-priority vehicle hardware issues: reproduce failures, collect logs and returned parts, confirm failure modes, and establish root cause.
- Define containment actions, drive corrective actions with mechanical, electrical, firmware, and software engineering teams, and verify effectiveness on test vehicles and in the fleet.
- Manage the return path for failed hardware from vehicle to bench, including tagging, teardown, functional confirmation, and documentation.
- Prioritize test and field findings into design change recommendations with supporting evidence; represent them in design reviews.
- Report test fleet results on a fixed cadence: exposure by vehicle and hardware revision, failures by subsystem normalized to exposure, and status of open issues.
You will work onsite five days a week in San Francisco with regular time in the garage and on the road, and travel to test sites and external labs.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Bachelor's degree in Mechanical, Electrical, Mechatronics, or Automotive Engineering, or related field. Equivalent hands-on experience considered in place of degree.
- 7+ years in vehicle test, validation, durability, field quality, or reliability engineering on prototype, pre-production, or production vehicles in automotive, EV, autonomous vehicle, or commercial vehicle programs.
- Experience running a test or durability fleet, including duty cycle definition, mileage accumulation planning, driver coordination, and configuration and test record control.
- Demonstrated ownership of field or test failures from first report through reproduction, root cause, containment, corrective action, and verification across multiple engineering teams.
- Hands-on failure analysis of returned vehicle hardware, including teardown, functional confirmation on a vehicle or buck, and coordination of ingress, thermal, and vibration testing with labs.
- Working knowledge of structured problem solving: 8D, 5 Whys, fishbone, and FMEA.
- Vehicle diagnostics experience: CAN and system log capture, DTC interpretation, and reading wiring diagrams, harness drawings, and BOMs.
- Experience working with technicians, test drivers, operations teams, and suppliers on failure confirmation and corrective action.
- Valid driver's license with clean driving record; ability to work onsite five days a week with regular travel to test sites and labs.
