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 Nextpower, we are driving the global energy transition with an integrated clean energy technology platform that combines intelligent structural, electrical, and digital solutions for utility-scale power plants. Our comprehensive portfolio enables faster project delivery, higher performance, and greater reliability, helping our customers capture the full value of solar power. Our talented worldwide teams are redefining how solar power plants are designed, built, and operated every day with smart technology, data-driven insights, and advanced automation. Together, we're building the foundation for the world's next generation of clean energy infrastructure.

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