Staff Machine Reliability Engineer

As Staff Machine Reliability Engineer, you will lead the resolution of Divergent’s complex and systemic machine reliability challenges across the additive manufacturing fleet. You will drive issues from escalation through root cause, engineering solution, and validated closure, while ensuring recurring failures are translated into durable technical improvements. 

This role operates across Machine Development, Product Support Engineering, Service, Production, and engineering SMEs to convert fleet experience into stronger design requirements, engineering standards, validation strategies, and future machine capabilities. The Staff, Machine Reliability Engineer combines deep technical problem solving with systems thinking, cross-functional leadership, and the ability to drive reliability improvements throughout the product lifecycle. 

• Screen, triage, group, organize, and support prioritization of engineering escalations based on fleet impact, recurrence, severity, and business need. 
• Determine the appropriate engineering ownership and engage the required SMEs across Hardware, Automation & Controls, Materials & Processes, MDE, Software, and Supplier Quality. 
• Drive clarity in clear ownership, priority, status, and next actions for open reliability issues. 
• Ensure engineering escalations move quickly from identification to actionable investigation. 

• Drive and support coordination of complex and cross-functional RCCAs for recurring, systemic, and machine-level failures. 
• Cultivate a problem-solving culture that looks beyond symptoms to identify and understand true root cause. 
• Challenge assumptions, identify gaps in evidence, and ensure technical conclusions are supported by data. 

• Coordinate with SMEs to develop engineering solutions and drive actions through completion. 
• Provide guidance and support evidence generation to demonstrate that a corrective action sufficiently resolves the issue. 
• Ensure technical debt is closed by ensuring the identification of root cause, the development of engineering solutions, and the validation that solutions correct the issue. 
• Track aging and closure of engineering actions. 

• Support the generation of engineering standards and requirements generation throughout the product lifecycle informed by reliability learnings 

• Serve as a technical leader for reliability problems that span multiple engineering disciplines and organizational boundaries. 
• Create alignment when ownership or technical direction is unclear and drive teams toward decisions based on evidence. 
• Communicate reliability risks, technical findings, tradeoffs, and recommended actions clearly to engineering and business leadership. 
• Improve the mechanisms, metrics, and processes used to manage engineering reliability issues and create a sustainable reliability function. 

• Ability to lawfully access information and technology that is subject to US export controls 
• Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Mechatronics, Manufacturing Engineering, Systems Engineering, or a related technical field. 
• 6+ years of experience in machine development, reliability engineering, manufacturing engineering, equipment engineering, or a related discipline. 
• Demonstrated experience leading complex root cause investigations and corrective actions on electromechanical or automated equipment. 
• Strong understanding of structured problem-solving methodologies such as RCCA, 8D, fault-tree analysis, FMEA, DOE, or equivalent methods. 
• Experience working across mechanical, electrical, controls, software, manufacturing, and/or process engineering disciplines. 
• Ability to interpret machine and production data, distinguish correlation from root cause, and translate findings into engineering action. 
• Demonstrated ability to independently drive technically ambiguous, cross-functional problems through resolution. 
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to communicate technical problems and risk to both technical and non-technical stakeholders. 

• 8+ years of experience developing, sustaining, or improving complex industrial equipment or automated manufacturing systems. 
• Experience with high-complexity capital equipment, laser powder bed fusion additive manufacturing, industrial automation, robotics, additive manufacturing, semiconductor equipment, aerospace manufacturing, or similar systems. 
• Experience owning reliability across a fleet of machines rather than resolving issues on a single piece of equipment. 
• Experience using fleet health, downtime, utilization, failure-rate, or maintenance data to prioritize engineering work. 
• Experience defining reliability requirements, validation criteria, or qualification strategies for new machine designs and engineering changes. 
• Demonstrated technical leadership at the Staff level, including influencing teams and driving decisions without direct authority. 
• Experience establishing or scaling reliability engineering processes, issue-management systems, engineering standards, or technical-debt reduction mechanisms. 

• Onsite