Reliability Engineer

Job Description: Reliability Engineering

About the Role

As a Reliability Engineering, you are a core technical expert within Cisco’s Quality Organization. You are responsible for the reliability execution across multiple product families (PFs), ensuring that our hardware meets rigorous quality standards from design through end-of-life. You will lead NPI engagements, manage cross-functional reliability tasks, and serve as the primary technical contact for product-level reliability issues. This role requires a strong technical leader who can drive project milestones, execute mitigation plans, and provide data-driven insights to engineering teams to ensure our networking infrastructure remains reliable and performant.

What You’ll Do

• Project Reporting & Advocacy: Serve as the Reliability Lead for project-level reviews. Provide technical counsel to program managers and engineering leads regarding risk mitigation and the status of reliability deliverables.
• Upfront Reliability Assessment: Manage materials and manufacturing reliability, product-level historical field reliability, and gap analysis to quantify risks for assigned products.
• Reliability Plan Execution: Execute milestone-based reliability plans from planning through design and development, driving deliverables and tracking progress against product objectives.
• Design-Phase Risk Analysis: Drive cross-functional FMEA and lead execution of derating analysis and schematic modeling, ensuring design parameters are validated prior to physical testing.
• Validation & Demonstration: Lead RDT planning, execution, and failure analysis through product validation, driving root cause resolution before launch.
• Launch & Field Performance: Drive early and ongoing field reliability monitoring, failure trending, and Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability (RAS) performance reporting; lead failure analysis for sustaining issues.
• Sustaining Quality and Reliability Programs: Manage ORT, burn-in, and related programs to ensure sustained product quality and reliability in manufacturing and field.
• Lessons Learned & Corrective Action: Participate in lessons learned and CLCA processes. Document findings to ensure insights are captured for current and future projects.
• Technical Mentorship: Provide technical guidance to junior engineers and cross-functional peers. Promote a culture of data-backed decision-making.
• Data Execution: Implement reliability data strategies by identifying data gaps in the factory and field and leveraging existing analytical methods to track reliability metrics.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Lead critical cross-functional projects. Influence internal stakeholders to ensure reliability methodologies and processes are integrated into the product lifecycle.

Who You Are

You are a technical expert with a strong command of hardware reliability and system architecture. You possess the project management skills to navigate complex product development cycles and the technical communication skills to drive consensus within engineering teams.

• Education & Experience: Bachelor’s Degree in Engineering or related field +8–10 years of experience, OR Master’s Degree +6–8 years of experience. Demonstrated success in managing reliability initiatives.
• Domain Knowledge: Expertise in data center infrastructure, network architecture, and PCBA-level failure mechanisms.
• Technical Influence: Proven ability to translate complex technical data into actionable insights for engineering and program management teams.
• Project Leadership: Experience leading technical projects and collaborating with cross-functional teams to drive product milestones.
• Analytics & Risk Management: Ability to identify technical challenges and implement solutions that optimize for RAS.
• Certification (Optional): Black Belt certification/CRE/CQE is preferred.

Why Cisco? 

At Cisco, we’re revolutionizing how data and infrastructure connect and protect organizations in the AI era – and beyond. We’ve been innovating fearlessly for 40 years to create solutions that power how humans and technology work together across the physical and digital worlds. These solutions provide customers with unparalleled security, visibility, and insights across the entire digital footprint.

Fueled by the depth and breadth of our technology, we experiment and create meaningful solutions. Add to that our worldwide network of doers and experts, and you’ll see that the opportunities to grow and build are limitless. We work as a team, collaborating with empathy to make really big things happen on a global scale. Because our solutions are everywhere, our impact is everywhere. 

We are Cisco, and our power starts with you.