Principal Equipment Life Cycle Engineer

Everything we do at Sunrun is driven by a determination to transform the way we power our lives. We know that starts at the individual employee level. We strive to foster an environment you can thrive in through our commitment to diversity, inclusion and belonging.

Overview

The Equipment Life Cycle Engineer (Reliability Engineer) is responsible for optimizing the life cycle management of equipment to minimize operational costs and maximize uptime. This role focuses on analyzing failure causes, performing in-depth cost analysis, and monitoring equipment degradation to ensure sustained operational efficiency.

The Equipment Life Cycle Engineer plays a pivotal role in enhancing overall operational efficiency and achieving a significant return on investment (ROI) through improved asset management and reduced total cost of ownership. This role will start by conducting an extremely extensive analysis of vast and diverse data sets to estimate degradation of equipment, and deviation from previously set regimes through contracts or agreements.

Then, the role will develop, by supporting corrective action plans with suppliers and the internal Supplier Quality Assurance team, as well as diving deeper into root cause analyses for both degradation and sudden failures. The latter will also tie back into our design and engineering tools to optimize equipment performance from the start.

Last, this role will develop into the constant heartbeat check for Sunrun’s fleet and our millions of deployed assets by supporting our strategic sourcing team to make better decisions, by supporting our Service Teams to develop optimized preventative maintenance schedules, and implementing strategies to ensure sustained operational efficiency from an individual system’s performance standpoint. The role will also serve as the key subject matter expert to both internal executives and all of Sunrun’s external partners, across legal, policy, and regulatory on all matters of equipment reliability.

If you are passionate about optimizing equipment performance and leveraging analytics to drive efficiency, we encourage you to apply.

Key Responsibilities:

• Track and analyze equipment degradation over time to predict performance drops and plan preemptive interventions. Use statistical analysis and modeling to forecast and mitigate potential failures.

• Investigate and address the root causes of equipment failures to enhance reliability and longevity. 

• Develop and implement strategies to reduce downtime and maintenance costs, aiming for incremental reductions in failure rates year by year. Leverage experience from previous roles in developing low-cost fault detection systems and reliability improvements.

• Perform thorough root cause analyses of equipment failures to identify and address underlying issues internal and with external independent engineers. Use Physics of Failure (PoF) methods to enhance the reliability of equipment and components.

• Utilize failure analysis insights to implement targeted improvements in equipment design, operation, and maintenance strategies, reducing replacement costs. Apply experience from managing reliability testing and analysis of electrochromic devices and solar power plants.

• Assess comprehensive costs of equipment, including maintenance, lost production, and other expenses, to inform procurement and maintenance decisions. Conduct extensive data analysis and modeling using tools like JMP, JSL scripts, and SQL.

• Develop optimized maintenance schedules and lifecycle management strategies using cost analysis. Implement and oversee maintenance programs for various equipment types, including batteries and photovoltaic (PV) modules.

• Implement strategies based on degradation analysis to ensure sustained operational efficiency and extend the useful life of equipment. Develop accelerated testing methods and physical acceleration models such as Arrhenius, Weibull, Coffin-Manson, and BET.

• Collaborate cross-functionally with teams including engineering, operations, and maintenance to align lifecycle management efforts with business objectives. Leverage experience in interacting with product development, engineering, and operations teams to create robust products and systems.

• Document lifecycle management processes and prepare regular reports and presentations to communicate results, progress, and recommendations to stakeholders and leadership. Provide detailed insights into equipment lifecycle status for internal and external stakeholders.