Sr Manager - Reliability & Root Cause Analysis

Job Description Summary

We are seeking an experienced Manager - Reliability & Root Cause Analysis to lead a multidisciplinary engineering team within the Fleet Intelligence & Reliability organization. The team is responsible for identifying systemic fleet risks, determining the physical and systemic causes of complex failures, and ensuring that corrective and preventive actions deliver measurable and sustainable reliability improvement across the global Solar and Storage installed fleet.
This role owns the technical governance of Root Cause Analyses for complex, high-impact, recurring, and fleet-wide issues. The manager will ensure that investigations are evidence-based, technically rigorous, and completed with clear accountability from initial containment through corrective-action validation and fleet-risk closure.
The leader will manage engineers across relevant disciplines, which may include power electronics, electrical systems, mechanical systems, embedded software, plant controls, and systems engineering. The position requires close partnership with Fleet Performance & Analytics, Product Engineering, Quality, Manufacturing, Sourcing, Project Engineering, Field Operations, and commercial teams to convert fleet experience into product and operational improvement.

Job Description

Roles and Responsibilities

• Lead, coach, and develop a multidisciplinary engineering team responsible for fleet reliability, failure investigation, and Root Cause Analysis.
• Own and continuously improve the RCA governance process, including issue prioritization, ownership assignment, technical reviews, milestones, escalation, corrective-action tracking, validation, and closure criteria.
• Lead investigations of complex, high-impact, systemic, and recurring failures affecting solar inverters, battery energy storage systems, plant controls, power conversion equipment, and associated interfaces.
• Ensure investigations are grounded in verified evidence, operating data, event logs, inspection results, failure reproduction, laboratory analysis, engineering calculations, and appropriate structured problem-solving methods.
• Differentiate failure symptoms, direct physical causes, contributing factors, systemic causes, and organizational causes, ensuring that conclusions are supported by evidence.
• Drive immediate containment, short-term mitigation, and permanent corrective and preventive actions with the relevant engineering and operational owners.
• Prioritize investigations using safety exposure, customer impact, availability loss, recurrence, fleet population, warranty exposure, and financial consequence.
• Maintain a fleet-level view of failure modes and systemic risk across products, projects, regions, configurations, software versions, suppliers, and operating environments.
• Partner with Fleet Performance & Analytics to use fleet data, trends, event signatures, and risk models to detect emerging issues, quantify exposure, and verify corrective-action effectiveness.
• Translate field and fleet learning into recommendations for product requirements, design changes, validation plans, software releases, manufacturing processes, supplier controls, maintenance strategies, and technical documentation.
• Provide technical leadership during critical fleet events, customer escalations, and executive-level issue reviews.
• Ensure customer-facing and internal RCA reports are accurate, evidence-based, clear, and delivered in accordance with committed milestones.
• Develop and maintain reusable engineering knowledge, including RCA standards, failure libraries, lessons learned, troubleshooting guides, technical advisories, and investigation templates.
• Support the definition and deployment of Change, Modification, and Upgrade actions resulting from fleet reliability findings.
• Establish and monitor meaningful metrics such as RCA cycle time, milestone adherence, recurrence rate, corrective-action closure, investigation backlog, and quantified fleet-risk reduction.
• Promote a culture of safety, technical rigor, accountability, collaboration, transparency, and continuous improvement.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Systems Engineering, Control Systems Engineering, Power Electronics, or a related technical field.
• Demonstratable experience in engineering, reliability, failure analysis, product engineering, installed-base engineering, or a related technical function.
• Demonstrated experience leading complex technical investigations or RCAs involving multidisciplinary systems.
• Demonstrated experience leading engineers, technical teams, or significant cross-functional engineering programs.
• Experience with power generation, renewable energy, battery energy storage, power conversion, industrial automation, or comparable complex industrial equipment.
• Ability and willingness to travel internationally as required.

Desired Characteristics

• Advanced degree in engineering, reliability, systems engineering, or a related discipline.
• Previous people-leadership experience within a global engineering or technical organization.
• Strong knowledge of solar inverters, battery energy storage systems, power electronics, plant controls, electrical protection, thermal management, and industrial communication networks.
• Experience applying structured investigation methodologies such as Fault Tree Analysis, 5 Whys, Ishikawa analysis, 8D, Kepner-Tregoe, or Failure Mode and Effects Analysis.
• Knowledge of reliability engineering, failure mechanisms, accelerated testing, design validation, reliability growth, and corrective-action effectiveness assessment.
• Experience analyzing operational data, waveforms, alarms, event logs, failed components, inspection evidence, and intervention history.
• Strong systems thinking, technical judgment, and ability to make risk-based decisions with incomplete or evolving information.
• Proven ability to influence Product Engineering, Quality, Manufacturing, Sourcing, Operations, and commercial teams in a matrixed environment.
• Strong customer-facing skills and the ability to communicate sensitive technical findings with clarity, credibility, and appropriate transparency.
• Ability to manage multiple high-priority investigations across a global fleet.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Self-starting attitude with the ability to establish structure, set priorities, develop people, and drive issues through sustainable closure.

Additional Information