---
title: 'Senior Hardware Reliability Engineer at Rhoda AI'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-hardware-reliability-engineer-rhoda-ai-mountain-view-tb5a3r2wpf2a'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-09'
---

# Senior Hardware Reliability Engineer at Rhoda AI

- **Company:** Rhoda AI
- **Location:** Mountain View, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Posted:** 2026-08-24
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-09
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/rhoda-ai/d5fbbdbd-3218-4c8e-b14c-94b546b90668

## Job description

At Rhoda AI, we’re building the next generation of generalist intelligent robots. We own the full robotics stack from high-performance hardware and robot systems to the infrastructure and state-of-the-art foundation world models that control our robots. Our robots are designed to be generalists capable of operating in complex, real-world environments and handling long-tail edge cases, made possible by our cutting edge research and end-to-end system design. We've raised over $450M and are investing aggressively in model research, infrastructure, hardware development, and manufacturing scale-up to make generalist robotics a reality.

As the Senior Hardware Reliability Engineer, you own reliability as an engineering discipline, not just a test outcome. Every mission profile we define, every acceleration factor we trust, every design change that prevents a failure mode from reaching hardware starts with the reliability analysis you run.

Reliability starts upstream of the test bench. In this role, you decompose platform and subsystem requirements into mission profiles — the duty cycles, load spectra, and environmental exposures Robot will actually see over its life in industrial workspaces — and use them to define how test campaigns should be accelerated, not just to interpret data once it exists. Those mission profiles set the acceleration factors, sample sizes, and pass/fail criteria for the HALT/HASS, thermal cycling, vibration, and fatigue campaigns run in partnership with the test engineers.

We operate as T-shaped engineers. You must be a strong generalist across electromechanical systems — actuators, motors, power electronics, structures — but your superpower for this role is translating ambiguous, early-stage requirements into mission profiles and accelerated test plans the rest of the org can design and test against.

## WHAT YOU'LL DO

- Mission Profile Decomposition: Decompose platform and subsystem requirements into mission profiles — duty cycles, load spectra, environmental exposure — that define what “real-world use” means for each hardware discipline.
- Accelerated Test Planning: Translate mission profiles into accelerated test plans: acceleration factors, sample sizes, and pass/fail criteria for HALT/HASS, thermal cycling, vibration, and fatigue campaigns, rather than only interpreting results after tests are run.
- Failure Mode Analysis: Build and maintain FMEA/FMECA analyses for critical subsystems, and drive design changes that eliminate failure modes before they reach hardware.
- Quantitative Reliability Modeling: Apply quantitative reliability methods (Weibull analysis, MTBF/MTTF, censored-data survival analysis, physics-of-failure acceleration models) to test and field data to predict and track reliability over time.
- Cross-Discipline Partnership: Partner with actuator, electrical, and structures test and design engineers to turn mission profiles into test-stand requirements, and to close the loop from test failure to root cause to design fix.
- Reliability Data Infrastructure: Build the reliability program's data infrastructure and reporting so the organization can track reliability trends and revisit mission-profile assumptions as the platform scales from prototype to production.

## WHAT YOU'LL BRING

- Education: Bachelor's or Master's degree in Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Reliability Engineering, or a related field.
- Experience: 5+ years in reliability engineering, with demonstrated ownership of mission profile development and accelerated test design.
- Mission Profile Development: Experience developing mission profiles or usage/environmental duty-cycle models from product requirements, and using them to define accelerated test plans.
- Acceleration Models: Working knowledge of acceleration models (Arrhenius, Coffin-Manson, inverse power law, or similar) used to translate mission profiles into lab test parameters.
- Quantitative Methods: Hands-on experience with FMEA/FMECA, Weibull analysis, and MTBF/MTTF modeling.
- Electromechanical Systems: Experience working with motors, actuators, power electronics, or similar systems in a product going through active development.
- Communication: Experience communicating reliability risk and recommendations to cross-functional engineering and program stakeholders.

## BONUS POINTS (THE “PLUS” LIST)

- Requirements Partnership: Experience partnering with systems or requirements engineering to define mission profiles for a new or evolving product line, rather than only applying an inherited one.
- Industry Background: Experience in automotive, EV, robotics, semiconductor, or consumer electronics reliability engineering.
- Founding Program Experience: Experience standing up a reliability program or reliability requirements from scratch on an early-stage or prototype-phase product.
- Electronics Reliability: Familiarity with low-voltage electronics, sensor, and power-electronics reliability, in addition to mechanical/structural fatigue and durability.
- Field Data: Experience with field-reliability or warranty data analysis in addition to lab-based accelerated testing.
- Tooling: Experience scripting or building tooling (Python or similar) for reliability data analysis and reporting.

## About Rhoda AI

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Rhoda AI builds robot foundation models that learn from internet-scale video to enable manipulation-capable robots to generalize in real-world industrial environments.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed + Series A; $680M total funding)
- **Headquarters**: Palo Alto, CA, United States
- **Founded**: 2024
- **Founders**: Jagdeep Singh (CEO), Eric Chan (Chief Scientist), Changan Chen (Chief Research Officer), Andrew Wooten, Gordon Wetzstein (Scientific Advisor) [rhoda.ai/team](https://www.rhoda.ai/team)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Hardware
- **Target customers**: B2B – industrial enterprises in automotive, manufacturing, logistics, and e-commerce
- **Mission/purpose**: “Building at the frontier of embodied intelligence” and “Designing intelligence for the real world” – deploying general-purpose robot foundation models that adapt to the variability of commercial and industrial environments. [rhoda.ai](https://www.rhoda.ai/) | [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/rhoda-ai)

## Products & Services
- **Rhoda Robot Platform (Hardware + Software)**: A turnkey robotic system with custom actuators (25kg rated, 40kg peak payload), safety-rated vision, wheel-base, and brakes in every actuator. The platform runs the **Direct Video Action** model, which pre-trains on over a million real-world videos and post-trains on task-specific robot data. Long-context windows enable single-shot learning from human demonstrations without retraining. [rhoda.ai](https://www.rhoda.ai/)
- **FutureVision Intelligence Layer**: A proprietary architecture that handles real-world industrial tasks autonomously by generalizing beyond conventional VLA pipelines. [rhoda.ai](https://www.rhoda.ai/)
- **Deployment Services**: End-to-end solutions for tasks such as returns processing, bearing decanting, container breakdown, and material transport in logistics and e-commerce facilities. [rhoda.ai](https://www.rhoda.ai/)

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not publicly disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total funding **$680M** – Seed round $67.4M (April 2024), Series A $162.6M (April 2025), and Series A $450M (March 2026) with 4 investors. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/rhoda-ai)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Not individually named in available sources; partners include customers in automotive, manufacturing, logistics, and e-commerce. [rhoda.ai](https://www.rhoda.ai/)
- **Growth Signals**: Headcount growth of **+20% monthly** (LinkedIn reports 55 employees; Built In reports 73 employees – conflicting data). Talent sourced from companies like QuantumScape, Flexiv Robotics, Scale AI, Google, Meta, NVIDIA, and Stanford University. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/rhoda-ai) | [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/rhoda-ai)

## Competitive Advantages
- **Direct Video Action architecture** with web-scale video pre-training gives a strong prior on motion, physics, and dynamics, enabling generalization beyond lab settings.
- **Custom high-performance actuators** (25kg rated, 40kg peak) with safety-rated brakes and vision – designed for 3+ years of continuous operation at rated payload.
- **Long-context in-context learning** allows the robot to perform tasks single-shot from human demonstrations without retraining.
- **Turnkey industrial deployments** that handle ambiguity and variability (e.g., debris, transparent bags, heavy boxes) – tasks customers initially believed could not be automated. [rhoda.ai](https://www.rhoda.ai/)

## Strategic Focus
- Scaling robot intelligence through a pre-training/post-training paradigm, moving from controlled labs to reliable production environments.
- Expanding commercial deployments across automotive, manufacturing, logistics, and e-commerce verticals.
- Pursuing a path to **physical AGI** by combining foundation models with custom hardware for real-world adaptability. [rhoda.ai](https://www.rhoda.ai/)

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: “Building at the frontier of embodied intelligence” – emphasis on hard problems, first-principles thinking, and category-defining systems. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/rhoda-ai)
- **Work policy**: Hybrid workspace (employees combine remote and on-site work), with offices in Mountain View and Palo Alto, CA. [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/rhoda-ai)
- **Engineering culture**: Strong research focus (Chief Research Officer, Chief Scientist, many research engineers/scientists). Recent job postings include Research Scientist, Robot Perception Engineer, Mechanical Engineer, Fullstack Engineer, and Product Manager. [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/rhoda-ai)
- **Notable perks**: Not explicitly listed, but the company is well-funded ($680M) and at an early stage (founded 2024), offering significant growth opportunity and impact.

## Sources
1. [rhoda.ai](https://www.rhoda.ai/) – Company website (product, technology, commercial applications)
2. [rhoda.ai/careers](https://www.rhoda.ai/careers) – Careers page
3. [rhoda.ai/team](https://www.rhoda.ai/team) – Leadership team and co-founders
4. [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/rhoda-ai) – Built In profile (employee count, offices, job listings, hybrid policy)
5. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/rhoda-ai) – LinkedIn company page (funding, headcount, executive list, talent sources)

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