Sr. Manager, Product Reliability

Job Description:

Job Description:

We are seeking a Sr. Manager, Product Reliability to join our team. In this role, you will be building a reliability program in India to support local product development and product lifecycle management from a reliability perspective.  You will be accountable for product reliability and for understanding, quantifying and communicating the risks associated with new product development and product management change.  This role will also be responsible for the hiring and managing reliability and test staff to fulfill the reliability mission for the Nextracker India. You, and staff you hire, will additionally work closely with internal, external labs and suppliers to assess products.  

Core Functions:

• Risk Analysis & Assessment: Establish systems to apply first principles approach to determining risk and impact. Organize brainstorming sessions with key stakeholders for quick risk discovery. Oversee Design Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (DFMEA) sessions during the concept and design phase to help identify failure modes specific solar tracker systems and prioritize mitigation strategies. 
• Reliability Test Planning: Ensure that reliability test plans are developed for products being designed and/or maintained in India. Work with the internal test lab and outdoor solar testing fields to direct and execute long term reliability tests for above type of products at component and system level.  

Develop accelerated life test protocols (HALT, HASS, fatigue testing, etc.) to simulate long-term performance in compressed timeframes. 

• Reliability Testing and Reporting: Ensure that engineering and test teams to get input on test equipment, custom test jigs, data acquisition systems, and test instrumentation to ensure accurate and consistent results. You will have accountability for owning and reporting all internal durability test data and results through standardized report formats that can act as collateral for customers.  
• Failure Analysis: Accountable for driving failure analysis based on reliability testing. Collaborate with suppliers to drive root cause analysis and take them to closure. Specify environmental and reliability tests needed to recreate failure modes. Co-ordinate with internal and external labs to scope out appropriate FA methodologies and interpret results and communicate recommendations.  
• Collaboration: Collaborate with Design, Manufacturing and Asset Management teams to implement and communicate design improvements based on test and field data. Collaborate with Quality team to drive root cause corrective actions and re-create failure modes through testing. Collaborate with Suppliers to specify reliability testing and review reliability test reports. 
• Modeling & Analysis: Establish system for reliability growth of new product development to quantify product maturation during and through long duration reliability tests, system level validation and field pilot trials.   

Additionally, the candidate is expected to have a good understanding of:  

• Knowledge of design for reliability (DfR) activities to incorporate reliability into early design phases. Experience with material selection, derating, redundancy and tolerance stack up analysis.  
• Relationship between use-case and accelerated test conditions based on a physics of failure approach for electromechanical components.  
• Fatigue and wear type failure modes in rotating and load bearing components and moving parts. Corrosion and vibration related failure modes in metallic structures and assemblies. Overload and yield failures in steel weldments and joints.  
• Reliability Growth Models like Duane or Crow-AMSAA to track reliability improvements over iterative testing and field pilots. Closed loop learning tools like FRACAS (Failure Reporting, Analysis and Corrective Action System) to drive corrective actions and improvements.  
• IEC, ASTM, ISO and ANSI standards related to environmental testing including but not limited to corrosion  

Qualifications:

Bachelor’s (Mechanical, Structural, Materials or relevant), 10 yrs experience. Master’s (Mechanical, Structural, Materials or relevant) preferred with 5-10 years’ experience.  

• 10+ years of experience in reliability testing and design for reliability methodologies with a background in Automotive or Aerospace or Industrial Equipment or Construction or Energy or relevant industry.  
• Experience with reliability tools and methodologies like FMEA, Fault Tree Analysis, Accelerated Life Testing, 8D Root Cause Analysis, Weibull Analysis, JMP, ReliaSoft 
• Hands-on experience with fatigue, vibration, load and thermal cycling type testing. 
• Experience working with environmental chambers, dynamometers, strain gauges, torque sensors, displacement transducers, pressure sensors and data acquisition systems. 

At Nextracker, we are leading in the energy transition, providing the most comprehensive portfolio of intelligent solar tracker and software solutions for solar power plants, as well as strategic services to capture the full value of solar power plants for our customers. Our talented worldwide teams are transforming PV plant performance every day with smart technology, data monitoring and analysis services.

For us at Nextracker, sustainability is not just a word. It's a core part of our business, values and our operations. Our sustainability efforts are based on five cornerstones: People, Community, Environment, Innovation, and Integrity. We are creative, collaborative and passionate problem-solvers from diverse backgrounds, driven by our shared mission to provide smart solar and software solutions for our customers and to mitigate climate change for future generations.

Culture Is Our Passion