Fleet Reliability Engineer

Description

The role sits in the AV Operations organization. The company is building advanced driver-assistance and autonomous-vehicle capabilities that depend on safe, reliable, and scalable fleet operations.

This is an individual contributor role at Level 6A, proposed under the Quality and Reliability Engineering job family.

You keep the operational fleet ready for its mission by combining vehicle troubleshooting, reliability analysis, maintenance and readiness support, and steady follow-through on corrective actions.

You work with Fleet Management, Service Operations, Troubleforce, Vehicle Integration, AV software and hardware teams, safety partners, and vehicle operators.

You turn recurring fleet problems into clear investigations, practical mitigations, lasting fixes, and measurable gains in uptime, utilization, and operational readiness.

You move between the vehicle, the maintenance work-order system, operational dashboards, and engineering discussions. You can take significant problems in your area on your own, judge well in a fast-moving setting, and explain findings to hands-on teams and engineering leaders.

In your first year, you will build working relationships across AV Operations, Fleet Management, Service Operations, Troubleforce, Vehicle Integration, and partner engineering. You will set up a repeatable way to monitor fleet health, rank reliability issues, document investigations, and close corrective actions. You will make downtime causes and duration easier to see, recommend changes that raise uptime and usable vehicle hours, and cut repeat issues. You will also build a dependable feedback loop from vehicles and frontline operations into engineering decisions, release readiness, fleet changes, and future AV programs.

Behaviors the company expects: own the outcome and follow issues to a durable fix; raise concerns constructively when reliability, safety, quality, or timing is at risk; understand what operators, engineers, and programs need from the fleet; improve tools and methods without weakening safety or traceability.

Responsibilities

• Track fleet health, availability, downtime, readiness, and repeat failure trends for AV test and data-collection vehicles, mainly at Milford Proving Ground and with other fleet locations as needed.
• Investigate problems across host-vehicle systems, autonomous-vehicle hardware, sensors, compute and instrumentation, connectivity, localization, calibration readiness, charging, and software-stack or system-health conditions.
• Lead structured troubleshooting and root-cause work from first identification through containment, corrective action, validation, documentation, and closure.
• Work with Service Operations and technicians to set work-order priorities, clear technical blockers, raise repair quality, and shorten the time to return vehicles to service.
• Support operational escalations and events that take vehicles out of service. Decide which temporary mitigations are safe and which issues need engineering ownership or vehicle removal.
• Analyze work-order, telemetry, incident, and operational data to find reliability hotspots, Pareto trends, repeat failures, maintenance gaps, and ways to raise fleet utilization.
• Build and maintain reliability reports, issue summaries, failure-mode tracking, readiness views, and recommendations for operations and engineering leaders.
• Write clear problem statements, impact assessments, failure timelines, and evidence packages so partner engineering teams can diagnose and fix issues quickly.
• Convert recurring operational issues into engineering work: defect reports, corrective-action plans, test requests, retrofit recommendations, parts requests, and follow-up validation.
• Support fleet changes, hardware and firmware updates, retrofits, configuration changes, and readiness work through controlled, traceable, auditable processes.
• Join design reviews, build and integration feedback, release-readiness discussions, and change-control meetings where fleet reliability or serviceability may be affected.
• Work with AV Operations and AV Test Engineering so vehicles, systems, tools, procedures, and support coverage are ready for closed-course, public-road, and data-collection work.
• Create and refine standard work, troubleshooting guides, escalation paths, maintenance practices, and handoff documents that work consistently across shifts and locations.
• Contribute to reliability metrics and operating routines, including fleet uptime, vehicle availability, downtime by cause, return-to-service performance, repeat repairs, issue response time, and deployment readiness.
• Share lessons learned and coach technicians, operators, and partner engineers on recurring issues, safe practices, diagnostic methods, and reliability improvements.
• Keep a strong safety focus. Stop, escalate, or contain work when vehicle condition, system behavior, facility conditions, or operating context creates unacceptable risk.
• Support other AV Operations priorities and special projects as business needs change.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in mechanical, electrical, automotive, systems, industrial, or computer engineering, or a related technical field.
• At least 2 years of relevant experience in automotive, autonomous vehicles, robotics, aerospace, consumer electronics, industrial equipment, or a similar technical operations setting.
• Experience troubleshooting complex electro-mechanical, software-enabled, or vehicle systems with a structured problem-solving method.
• Experience doing root-cause analysis and building corrective or preventive actions that improve reliability, quality, or operational performance.
• Ability to read technical information, work-order history, diagnostic data, logs, measurements, and operational metrics to form and test hypotheses.
• Proven ability to juggle several issues and priorities while keeping ownership, documentation quality, and follow-through.
• Strong written and spoken communication, including explaining technical issues clearly to technicians, operators, engineers, and leaders.
• Ability to work in a hands-on operations setting that may include vehicle yards, maintenance areas, test facilities, and shifting priorities.
• Ability to work on-site at Milford Proving Ground and travel about 10% for fleet operations, partner locations, or engineering work.
• Ability to meet the GM, facility, safety, and vehicle-operation requirements that apply to your assigned work, including holding a valid driver's license where required.
• Preferred: Experience supporting autonomous vehicles, advanced driver-assistance systems, robotics fleets, or other safety-critical vehicle or mobile systems.
• Preferred: Working knowledge of SDV 2.0 concepts, software-defined vehicle architecture, vehicle compute, electronic control units, over-the-air updates, vehicle configuration, or software and hardware change management.
• Preferred: Experience with host-vehicle systems, automotive diagnostics, vehicle networks, sensors, calibration, localization, compute, connectivity, or autonomous-driving system integration.
• Preferred: Experience with fleet-management, maintenance, incident-management, or reliability systems and dashboards.
• Preferred: Familiarity with issue-tracking and collaboration tools such as Jira, Confluence, Slack, Microsoft Office, or similar platforms.
• Preferred: Experience using work-order and fleet-health data to build Pareto analyses, trend reports, operational dashboards, or reliability scorecards.
• Preferred: Familiarity with reliability methods such as FMEA, fault-tree analysis, 8D, FRACAS, statistical process control, or similar structured approaches.
• Preferred: Experience with SQL, Python, spreadsheets, command-line tools, telemetry analysis, or other ways of automating analysis and improving operational visibility.
• Preferred: Experience supporting hardware retrofits, fleet campaigns, validation drives, closed-course testing, public-road testing, or return-to-service decisions.
• Preferred: Experience working with external service providers, parts suppliers, repair facilities, or distributed operations teams.

Conditions

Primary work location is Milford Proving Ground.

Travel is approximately 10%.

Base salary range is $124,420 to $140,000. The offer within that range depends on job-related factors.

The compensation figures are a good-faith estimate under applicable state law and may not apply to roles outside New York, Colorado, California, or Washington.

Candidates may be required, where applicable, to complete a role-related assessment and or a pre-employment screening before starting.

The company is committed to equal employment opportunity and an inclusive workplace.

Benefits

• Incentive pay based on company performance, job level, and individual performance.
• Medical, dental, and vision coverage, plus a Health Savings Account and Flexible Spending Accounts.
• Retirement savings plan, sickness and accident benefits, and life insurance.
• Paid vacation and holidays, tuition assistance, an employee assistance program, and GM vehicle discounts, among other options.
• This job may be eligible for relocation benefits.