System Safety and Reliability Engineer

At The ePlane Company, our vision for urban air mobility rests on two pillars: safety and reliability. We are seeking a meticulous and experienced engineer to join our safety team as a technical champion for both. You will play a vital role in ensuring our aircraft is not only safe but also consistently dependable. You will play a vital role in ensuring that every flight computer, sensor, and communication link is not only safe but also consistently dependable. This is a critical role where your expertise will shape the core architecture of our systems, embedding integrity and resilience into every component to build an aircraft worthy of absolute trust.

The ePlane Company is at the forefront of India's urban air mobility revolution. Incubated at IIT Madras, we are a deep-tech startup dedicated to designing and building the world's most compact electric flying taxi. Our mission is to make door-to-door flying a reality, drastically reducing commute times and decongesting our cities for a cleaner, greener future. We're a passionate team of engineers, designers, and visionaries working on cutting-edge technology, and we're looking for brilliant minds to help us take flight.

As a System Safety and Reliability Engineer, you will be a vital part of the safety team, driving key technical activities and collaborating across all engineering departments. You will:

• →Execute Safety & Hazard Analysis: Conduct and contribute to critical safety assessments for the team, including Functional Hazard Assessments (FHA), Fault Tree Analysis (FTA), and Failure Mode, Effects, and Criticality Analysis (FMECA) at the aircraft level and at the system levels (focused on Avionics, Flight Controls and other aircraft systems).
• →Develop Reliability Models: Apply your subject matter expertise to construct and analyze comprehensive reliability models using techniques such as Reliability Block Diagrams (RBD) and Markov Analysis to predict system availability and MTBF.
• →Define Technical Requirements: Play a critical role in deriving and managing the system-level safety and reliability requirements based on team analyses, ensuring they are flowed down to design teams.
• →Champion Design for Reliability (DfR): Proactively collaborate with engineering teams, providing technical guidance to incorporate reliability, maintainability, and safety principles into the design process.
• →Contribute to the Safety Case: Actively contribute to the development and maintenance of the overall aircraft safety case, integrating reliability predictions and validation evidence to demonstrate compliance.
• →Support Certification Efforts: Serve as a key technical point of contact within the safety team for discussions with certification authorities (like DGCA, EASA), preparing documentation and presenting analyses.

• Experience: 5+ years of hands-on experience in a system safety and/or reliability engineering role within a safety-critical industry (aviation, automotive, defense, or space) preferably with a focus on avionics, embedded systems, or complex electronics.
• Education: Bachelor’s degree in Aerospace, Mechanical, Electrical, Systems Engineering, or a related technical field.
• Practical Safety Analysis Expertise: Non-negotiable, hands-on experience executing at least one of the following core safety assessments: FMEA/FMECA, FTA, or FHA. Broader experience across multiple methods is highly desirable.
• Reliability Modeling Expertise: Demonstrable experience in reliability engineering, including creating and analyzing Reliability Block Diagrams (RBDs) and Markov models.
• Knowledge of Safety Standards: Deep understanding of the principles and processes outlined in major safety standards, such as ARP4761 / ARP4754A (Aviation) or ISO 26262 (Automotive).
• Systems Thinking: Strong ability to understand complex, interdependent systems and to trace the propagation of failures across hardware and software boundaries.

• A Master’s degree in a relevant engineering discipline.
• Direct experience in aerospace safety and reliability, particularly with eVTOL, UAV, or Part 23/25 aircraft development.
• Thorough familiarity with the entire suite of aerospace development standards, including DO-178C (Software) and DO-254 (Hardware).
• Experience with avionics data buses and communication protocols (e.g., ARINC 429, CAN, Ethernet).
• Experience interacting with aviation certification authorities (e.g., FAA, EASA, DGCA).
• Proficiency with safety and reliability analysis software (e.g., Ansys medini analyze, ReliaSoft suite (Weibull++, BlockSim), PTC Windchill, Isograph Reliability Workbench).
• Experience with Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) systems.
• Familiarity with Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) and tools like SysML.