Senior Manager, Global Fleet Reliability Operations

About the role

As Senior Manager, Global Fleet Reliability Operations at Applied Intuition, you will play a critical role in maintaining and enhancing the reliability of our vehicle fleets across multiple projects around the world. You will lead the teams responsible for the end to end lifecycle of issue management — from an issue reported on a single vehicle, through root cause, to landing the resulting fix across every affected vehicle in the fleet.

Fleet Reliability is the single intake funnel for vehicle and platform issues. Your teams capture every issue, classify it, and either resolve it against a documented playbook or escalate it to the owning engineering team with diagnostics attached. Where an issue is systemic, your reliability engineers own the root cause analysis and bring it to engineering with the failure mode understood. Getting that right means knowing enough about the vehicle, its operating system, and its data to tell a hardware fault from a software one before it reaches an engineer.

Engineering owns the design and development of the platform change itself. You own both sides of it: the quality of the diagnosis going in, and the rollout coming out — driving the change order, partnering with engineering on the change plan, coordinating with build and integration teams to land it across the fleet, and holding the validation gate that returns each vehicle to service.

You will run this across two distinct operating modes: development vehicles, where an engineer is on site and repro is hands-on and fast, and production fleets, where triage runs on telemetry and operator logs against customer-visible SLAs. You will build and grow those teams across regions, and you will bridge the gap between operations and engineering to understand the needs of our customers and how to better enhance their experience with Applied products.

At Applied Intuition, you will:

• Lead global fleet reliability across multiple programs — own the end-to-end lifecycle of vehicle issues from report, through root cause, to a landed fleet-wide fix.

• Own triage across both development and production fleets — define the intake, tooling, and staffing model for each (on-site engineer support and fast repro cycles for development vehicles; telemetry, operator logs, and SLA-driven queues for customer fleets), and build the playbooks and runbooks that let your teams resolve the large majority of recurring issues at first touch.

• Own root cause analysis and engineering change management — partner with engineering on permanent fixes for recurring and systemic failure modes, and own the change program that lands approved fixes across the fleet, coordinating with build and integration teams to track global rollouts.

• Own the validation gates that return a vehicle to service, so no vehicle rejoins a fleet before it’s confirmed ready, and set the bar for escalation quality so issues that reach engineering arrive with the fault isolated and supporting data attached.

• Build and lead the team — hire, onboard, and develop a mix of full-time engineers and a contract technical workforce across multiple regions and time zones, act as the liaison across operations, engineering, and program management, and stay close to the vehicle yourself when an issue warrants it.

• Own fleet uptime and reporting — be accountable for uptime against program targets, and build the tooling and reporting (daily fleet health, weekly issue trends, downtime aging, first-touch resolution) that make it visible.

We're looking for someone who has:

• BS/MS in Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or similar

• 10+ years experience working with automotive hardware and software

• 5+ years leading technical teams across multiple regions, time zones, or vehicle programs — including hiring and developing engineers or technicians, and managing a mix of full-time and contract/vendor-supplied technical workforce.

• Experience owning a reliability, triage, or service function with a formal escalation and root cause process

• Experience owning an engineering change or configuration control process

• Experience building tooling or dashboards that improved operational efficiency for technical and non-technical teams

• Experience with hardware reliability and testing

• Experience with AV components (LiDAR, RADAR, Cameras, etc.)

• Working fluency with Linux-based vehicle software — able to read system logs, inspect services and drivers, and isolate a middleware or comms-stack fault from a hardware one well enough to route it correctly

• Comfort working in fleet telemetry and log data to diagnose issues remotely, without physical access to the vehicle

• Strong hands-on debugging ability, and a willingness to work on the vehicle, on the command line, and in the data yourself

Nice to have:

• Experience supporting both development and production vehicle fleets, and an understanding of how triage differs between them

• Experience operating against customer-facing SLAs on a deployed fleet

• Experience building or scaling a runbook and playbook library for a technical support or triage organization

• Knowledge of automotive communication (CAN/CAN FD, LIN, Automotive Ethernet)

• Knowledge/Experience with common CAN/CAN FD tools (Vector, PCAN View/Explorer)

• Experience with SW development tools (GitHub, Docker, Cursor, etc.)

• Familiarity with CI/CD and build systems, enough to triage a build or release-tooling failure to the right owner

• Experience with software tools/services like Slack, Jira, and Confluence