Job Description

Senior Engineer — Reliability & Sustaining

Brushless DC Motor Production & Reliability · Biñan, Laguna, Philippines · Full-time, on-site

Find out what actually failed. Fix the design, not the symptom. Then prove it never comes back — on a product line that keeps shipping while you do it.

About Atlas Motion

We design and build world-class outrunner brushless DC motors for the next generation of medium- to heavy-lift drones and long-endurance UAVs. We are a lean, fast-moving engineering team that takes motors from first principles — electromagnetics, thermals, and structures — all the way to a manufacturable, production-ready product, and we are scaling that product into real volume. Every motor we ship is designed in-house, from the flux path up.

If you would rather own hard problems end-to-end than tune someone else's design, you will fit right in.

The Role

As our Senior Engineer — Reliability & Sustaining, you own the motor after it is released. Every change to a shipping design, every part and supplier we qualify, every unit that comes back, every chronic yield problem, and every reliability number we put in front of a customer runs through you. You will sit inside design engineering rather than beside it, because a sustaining fix that never reaches the drawing is not a fix. You will report to the Principal Engineer. This is a senior, high-ownership role in a small team — you will be on the production floor, at a supplier, over a teardown, and in a design review, often in the same week. You will wear several hats today and grow a team around you as volume scales.

What you will do

SUSTAINING ENGINEERING & CHANGE CONTROL

Own the engineering change process end to end — raise it, assess it, validate it, cut it in, and verify it took. You are the gatekeeper on what changes and when.
Assess every proposed change for form, fit, function, and interchangeability, and decide how much requalification the change genuinely warrants — no more, no less.
Own configuration management: drawing and BOM revisions, effectivity and cut-in points, and keeping as designed and as-built in agreement.
Manage the changes we do not choose — supplier change notices, material obsolescence, second sourcing, and process substitutions — without letting any of them quietly degrade the product.
Maintain separate configurations and lot traceability where the supply chain is regulated, down to material certification.

QUALIFICATION & PPAP

Own the qualification path for every new part, new supplier, and changed process — what has to be proven, to what evidence standard, and before which build.
Run PPAP submissions with our suppliers and for our own assembled product: design records, process flow, PFMEA, control plan, measurement system analysis, dimensional and material results, initial process capability studies, and the part submission warrant.
Decide the submission level each part actually warrants. A bracket screw and a rotor assembly do not need the same evidence package, and treating them the same costs time without buying confidence.
Own first article inspection — ours and our suppliers — along with the ballooned drawing and the inspection report behind it.
Define the requalification triggers: which changes force a full resubmission, which need a delta, and which need nothing at all. Write the rule down once so it is not re-argued every time.
Build and maintain control plans and the inspection criteria that flow from them, and keep both current as the process moves.
Hold the qualification gate. A part that has not passed does not go into a flight build, whatever the schedule is doing.

FAILURE ANALYSIS & CORRECTIVE ACTION

Own the return loop: teardown, measurement, root cause, and a corrective action that actually closes.
Work the failure modes this product really has — bearing wear and contamination, winding insulation breakdown, bonded and interference joint failure, magnet retention and demagnetisation, terminations and solder joints, imbalance growth, and housing deformation.
Run structured root cause — 8D, five-why, fault tree — and refuse to close on a plausible story the evidence does not support.
Run the escape analysis as well: not only why it failed, but why inspection and end-of-line test did not catch it.
Push every finding back across the whole product family, not just the unit in front of you.

PRODUCTION & SUPPLIER SUPPORT

Be design engineering's answer on the floor: deviations, material review dispositions, and the use-as-is, rework, or scrap call — with evidence behind it, every time.
Own process capability on the critical characteristics, and re-open the tolerance stack-up when production reality disagrees with it.
Turn yield loss and scrap into identified design or process causes, then close them.
Drive corrective action at the source with our suppliers, and set the incoming inspection criteria that follows from our own failure data.
Drive cost down through value engineering that does not quietly spend performance or reliability margin.

What we are looking for

7+ years in sustaining, reliability, product, or manufacturing engineering on an electromechanical product in volume production — including real ownership of a design that was already shipping.
Hands-on PPAP and part qualification experience — you have assembled the evidence package yourself, not just reviewed someone else's: control plans, MSA, capability studies, and first article inspection.
The judgment to right-size a qualification package to the risk the part actually carries, and to defend that call to a customer or an auditor.
Genuine root cause capability: structured problem solving backed by the hands-on teardown and measurement skill to prove it.
Reliability methods — life data and Weibull analysis, accelerated and endurance testing, FMEA, and bearing and fatigue life calculation.
Change control and configuration management discipline, including effectivity and cut-in management on a line that is already running.
Working statistics: capability indices, SPC, and sampling — plus the judgment to know when a dataset does not support the conclusion being drawn from it.
CAD and FEA (SolidWorks and SolidWorks Simulation, or equivalent) — you make the fix, you do not just describe it.
Solid Python for production, test, and field data analysis.
Fluency in engineering drawings, GD&T, and tolerance stack-up analysis.
You reason from physics first, you verify a number two independent ways before you trust it, you show your work, and you flag uncertainty instead of guessing.

Bonus points

BLDC / PMSM or outrunner motors specifically — windings, laminations, magnets, bearings, balancing, and impregnation.
Drone or UAV propulsion, or any product where a field failure is not a warranty claim but an aircraft.
Hands-on failure analysis technique — sectioning, microscopy, hardness, and bonded joint evaluation.
Adhesive and interference-fit joint design, qualification, and failure investigation.
Driving PPAP and first article qualification through overseas suppliers who have never completed one before.
APQP, or an equivalent structured new-product qualification framework.
Quality management system experience (ISO 9001, AS9100) carried lightly — we want the discipline, not the paperwork.
Experience with a product that scaled from thousands to tens of thousands of units a month.

In your first six months you might

take full ownership of the return and failure analysis loop,
stand up a repeatable qualification and PPAP path for new parts and new suppliers,
close out the open corrective actions on the shipping product,
get change control to the point where every revision is traceable and every change is verified,
build the reliability dataset — test and field — that tells us what actually fails and when, and turn one chronic yield problem into a closed design fix.

Who thrives here

This is a startup. We move fast, we own our mistakes, and we scale what works. We are looking for high-agency, high-octane engineers who are genuinely passionate about machines — the kind of people who take things apart just to understand how they tick.

work with minimal supervision and chase a failure until you genuinely understand it,
know the difference between a fix and a workaround, and refuse to ship the second one,
can hold a disposition or a qualification gate when the schedule is pushing hard the other way,
want to grow with the company as we scale from thousands to tens of thousands of units a month, and
care about getting the physics right — not just getting an answer.

Tools you will work with