Director, Reliability Engineering - Redmond, Washington, United States

Originally posted 29 September 2026 by the employer.

About the role

This role involves owning the reliability pipeline from failure-mechanism studies through qualification to customer sign-off, focusing on innovative light control metasurface (LCM™) beam forming chips. You will be accountable for lifetime claims and the evidence supporting them.

What you'll do

• Own the reliability pipeline end to end, from fundamental LCM failure-mechanism studies through component, module, and system qualification, to the data package delivered for customer sign-off.
• Own customer mission profiles and convert them into qualification plans based on use conditions across various products.
• Design and execute qualification studies to isolate specific failure mechanisms.
• Maintain a map of known, suspected, and unexamined mechanisms and design experiments to close gaps.
• Build lifetime models, including time-to-failure distributions, acceleration factors, and activation energies.
• Close the loop into design and process by driving Design for Reliability and Design for Test reviews and correlating reliability outcomes to fab process splits.
• Define screening strategy for pass/fail criteria, burn-in, production screens, and ongoing reliability monitoring.
• Represent reliability to customers, presenting data and negotiating qualification scope.
• Work across teams, ensuring findings in one team lead to decisions in others.
• Build and lead the reliability team, hiring, mentoring, and setting technical and documentation standards.

What you'll need

• Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, physics, materials science, or related fields.
• 15+ years in semiconductor or optoelectronic reliability, failure analysis, or quality engineering, including leading a reliability function or major qualification program.
• Proven track record taking a new technology from prototype through qualification into volume production.
• Statistical fluency in time-to-failure distributions (Weibull, lognormal), acceleration modeling (Arrhenius, Peck), sample size and confidence planning, and lifetime projection.
• Rigor in experimental design and execution, including controls, sample structure, stress levels, and readpoints.
• Experience with novel device technologies or material sets with undocumented failure modes.
• Experience translating customer mission profiles into qualification plans and lifetime requirements.
• Experience owning qualification at both component and module/system level.
• Working knowledge of JEDEC, AEC-Q100/Q102, and ISO.
• Experience presenting qualification data directly to external customers and their quality organizations.

Nice to have

• Master’s or PhD in electrical engineering, physics, materials science, or related fields.
• Background in liquid crystal devices (LCoS, displays), MEMS, image sensors, or photonics.
• Automotive or industrial qualification experience where data was audited by a customer.
• Experience building a reliability function from a small team, defining process where none existed.
• Experience running split-lot DOEs with wafer fabs or materials vendors to improve intrinsic reliability.
• Experience defining burn-in and production screening for early-failure elimination.
• Experience with lidar, 3D sensing, or optical modules and their system-level tradeoffs.

Skills: reliability pipeline, qualification, failure analysis, lifetime models, JEDEC, AEC-Q100