Senior Hardware Reliability Engineer

About Aalo Atomics

Aalo Atomics is pioneering a new era in clean energy with factory-fabricated microreactors designed to deliver affordable, scalable, and reliable nuclear power. Our mission is to make nuclear energy globally accessible, starting with the Aalo-1, a 10 MWe reactor leveraging cutting-edge safety, modularity, and efficiency. Based in Austin, TX, we're rapidly growing as we work to deploy the world's first fleet of advanced microreactors. Join us and help revolutionize energy for a sustainable future.

About the role

Aalo is seeking a Senior Reliability Engineer to lead reliability engineering across components, subsystems, and modular assemblies-establishing the analytical and experimental basis for reliability estimates, identifying critical failure modes, and helping teams translate requirements into robust designs and verification plans.

A key responsibility is reviewing and developing experiments for reliability estimation, including assessing sample sizes, test conditions, statistical models, and acceptance criteria, and developing strategies such as accelerated-life, degradation, and system-level testing.

This hands-on, cross-functional role requires rigorous statistical judgment and close collaboration with design, test, manufacturing, quality, safety, and systems engineering teams.

What you'll do

Reliability Program Development & Application:

• Own and advance Aalo's reliability engineering methods for components, subsystems, and modular assemblies.

• Develop reliability requirements, allocations, predictions, and verification strategies throughout the product lifecycle.

• Select and apply appropriate statistical models, such as Weibull and lognormal life models, survival analysis, Bayesian methods, reliability growth models, and physics-of-failure approaches.

• Develop statistically defensible approaches for estimating reliability when test articles, time, or failure data are limited.

• Analyze test and field data to estimate failure rates, life distributions, confidence intervals, and uncertainty.

• Combine test evidence, analysis, supplier data, operating experience, and engineering judgment into traceable reliability estimates.

Design of Experiments Review & Execution:

• Review or develop designs of experiments intended to estimate or demonstrate reliability, including test objectives and measurable responses, sample-size and statistical-power calculations, factor selection and interaction effects, environmental and operational stress profiles, censoring and stopping criteria, confidence bounds, and applicability of component-level results to modular assemblies.

• Create and execute designs of experiments for reliability estimation, including accelerated-life testing, degradation testing, highly accelerated testing, and combined-stress testing.

• Work with test engineering to define instrumentation, data-acquisition requirements, test fixtures, stress conditions, and data-quality controls.

Analysis & Risk Assessment:

• Lead or support FMEA/FMECA, fault-tree analysis, reliability block diagrams, common-cause evaluations, and root-cause investigations.

• Assess interfaces and dependencies within modular assemblies, including failure propagation, load sharing, redundancy, maintainability, and integration risk.

• Identify and evaluate uncertainties and assumptions in reliability models and estimates.

Quality & Assurance:

• Create reliability plans, reports, models, test protocols, and technical justifications suitable for internal design reviews and external scrutiny.

• Ensure reliability methods, scope, and level of rigor are consistent with the maturity of the design and the requirements of safety-critical systems.

• Strengthen and maintain repeatable, scalable reliability practices and documentation across Aalo.

Cross-Functional Collaboration:

• Partner with design engineers to identify reliability risks early and recommend design changes that improve robustness, inspectability, maintainability, and service life.

• Collaborate with manufacturing and supplier-quality teams to evaluate process variation and its effect on product reliability.

• Work closely with safety and systems engineering teams to relate component and subsystem reliability estimates to system-level performance and risk.

• Mentor engineers and strengthen reliability and experimental-design practices across Aalo.

Required Qualifications

Education:

• Bachelor's degree in Mechanical, Electrical, Nuclear, Systems, Materials, Aerospace, or another relevant engineering discipline from an accredited institution.

Experience:

• Minimum of seven (7) years of relevant experience in reliability engineering, product assurance, test engineering, or a closely related field.

• Demonstrated experience developing and critically reviewing designs of experiments for reliability estimation or demonstration.

• Strong knowledge of reliability statistics, life-data analysis, confidence intervals, sample-size determination, and accelerated testing.

• Experience applying reliability methods to physical components and integrated hardware assemblies.

• Proficiency with methods such as FMEA/FMECA, fault-tree analysis, reliability block diagrams, reliability growth, and root-cause analysis.

• Ability to distinguish between qualification testing, reliability estimation, reliability demonstration, and screening-and to design tests appropriate to each objective.

• Experience working with incomplete, censored, sparse, or heterogeneous reliability data.

Preferred Qualifications

• Advanced degree (M.S. or Ph.D.) in Reliability Engineering, Statistics, Systems Engineering, or a related discipline.

• Experience in nuclear energy, aerospace, defense, automotive, industrial equipment, or another highly regulated or safety-critical industry.

• Familiarity with probabilistic risk assessment and the relationship between component reliability estimates and system-level risk models.

• Experience with Bayesian reliability methods and combining test data with prior information or operating experience.

• Knowledge of physics-of-failure modeling, environmental qualification, thermal cycling, vibration, radiation effects, corrosion, fatigue, wear, or other relevant degradation mechanisms.

• Experience evaluating reliability across hierarchical systems, from individual parts to subsystems and modular assemblies.

• Proficiency with statistical and reliability tools such as Python, R, JMP, Minitab, MATLAB, ReliaSoft, or equivalent software.

• Certified Reliability Engineer or comparable professional certification.

Core Competencies

• Strong technical writing and communication skills.

• Rigorous statistical judgment and analytical problem-solving ability.

• Ability to work effectively across design, test, manufacturing, quality, safety, and systems teams.

• Adaptability in a fast-paced, evolving R&D environment.

• Commitment to quality assurance, safety culture, and the rigor expected of safety-critical systems.

Requirements:

• Based in the United States
• Willing to work on-site in Austin, TX

What We Offer:

• Paid Time Off
• Corporate Gym Membership

Additional Information:

Aalo Atomics provides a collaborative and supportive work environment, opportunities for professional growth, intellectually challenging careers, and competitive compensation. Aalo Atomics is an equal opportunity employer and considers all employment decisions without regard to race, color, religion, national or ethnic origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.

Applicants must be U.S. Citizens or U.S. Persons in compliance with 10 CFR Part 810 and may not hold non-compliant foreign citizenships.

Direct applicants only. No recruiters or staffing agencies, please.