Fleet Reliability Engineer (Maritime IoT)

Location: On-site in Arlington, Virginia, United States; periodic travel to vessels, ports, installation sites, and occasional international field locations is required. Must be legally authorized to work in the United States.

Company

hirify.global develops SmartMast, a vessel-mounted sensor platform combining cameras, software-defined radios, onboard AI compute, power systems, and satellite connectivity to provide real-time maritime intelligence.

What you will do

• Own fleet-wide reliability metrics including uptime, availability, MTBF, MTTR, data yield, and component-level failure rates.
• Build dashboards, alerting, and telemetry pipelines that identify degrading power, thermal, connectivity, camera, radio, and compute subsystems before failure.
• Lead field-failure investigations from telemetry analysis through physical teardown, and drive FMEA, fault-tree analysis, CAPA, and corrective actions to closure.
• Translate field failures into hardware, firmware, manufacturing, component-selection, supplier-qualification, and design-for-reliability improvements.
• Define preventive maintenance, spares, RMA, repair-and-return, installation, diagnostics, and field-repair processes for a growing fleet.
• Establish environmental and life-test protocols and support deployments and complex repairs at vessels, ports, and installation sites.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Electrical, Mechanical, Systems, Reliability, or a related engineering discipline, or equivalent hands-on experience.
• 5+ years of engineering experience with deployed electro-mechanical hardware, including at least 2 years in reliability, sustaining or field engineering, or hardware operations.
• Direct ownership of reliability outcomes for a fielded fleet or installed base, including uptime, failure rates, or MTBF/MTTR.
• Hands-on experience with 8D, 5-Whys, fishbone analysis, FMEA, fault-tree analysis, and CAPA.
• Ability to diagnose electro-mechanical systems using telemetry, logs, bench instruments, and physical teardown; proficiency with SQL and Python or equivalent tools.
• Legal authorization to work in the United States and ability to satisfy customer- or contract-driven eligibility requirements for government and maritime-security work.

Nice to have

• Experience with marine, offshore, automotive, aerospace, defense, satellite, telecom, or other harsh-environment fleets.
• Knowledge of IP-rated enclosures, corrosion and salt-fog effects, marine power systems, and IEC 60529, MIL-STD-810, or IEC 60068.
• Experience with connected or edge devices, remote diagnostics, OTA firmware updates, SATCOM or cellular telemetry, cameras, RF systems, batteries, or edge-AI hardware.
• Experience building a reliability or sustaining-engineering function from scratch, preferably at a hardware startup or scaling operation.
• ASQ Certified Reliability Engineer certification or comparable credential.

Culture & Benefits

• High-ownership role building the reliability program from the ground up.
• Direct impact on a fleet operating across more than 25 countries and over 10 million nautical miles.
• Close collaboration with hardware, firmware, manufacturing, field-service, and leadership teams.
• Hands-on work spanning engineering, data analysis, physical hardware, and maritime field operations.
• Opportunity to scale reliability processes and tooling from hundreds to thousands of deployed units.