September 2013. That was the date I accepted an offer for a Maintenance and Reliability Engineer role in one of the largest oil and gas service companies in the world. I had no clue what the role really meant. Since it was about industrial equipment, I thought, I am a Mechanical Engineer, I will figure it out.
Later I realized it was not only me who did not know what reliability engineers do. More or less all my stakeholders, including my manager, were not very clear about it either. So, I had to learn on my own, and later find ways to add value to the business.
What you will get out of this article?
If you are a fresh graduate engineer looking to build a career in reliability engineering, or a company unsure about what type of engineering service to seek or who to hire to improve product or process reliability, you are in the right place.
By spending just 10 minutes reading this article, you will learn:
- What reliability engineering really is
- The different reliability engineering roles
- The key skill sets required for each role
What Reliability Engineering Really Is
At its core, reliability engineering is about ensuring that things work consistently, safely, and cost-effectively, for as long as they are intended to, under the environmental and operational conditions they will face.
If your Toyota Corolla runs for years without failing as long as you maintain it, if your phone survives a few accidental drops, or if your asset in a factory keeps producing quality products day after day, that is RELIABILITY.
Why We Need Reliability Engineers
If design engineers specialized in their field can design reliable products by using core engineering principles, why do we need reliability engineers?
It is because the real world is chaotic, full of unknowns, variability, and uncertainty that are difficult to address with purely deterministic principles. To navigate this complexity, uncertainty and variability must be managed in a probabilistic way.
Another reason is that design engineers typically focus on immediate functionality, meaning “how a system will work,” whereas reliability engineers concentrate on how systems might fail and what the consequences of failure will be. In today’s world, basic functionality alone is not enough for consumers; they also care about whether a product will last longer and operate safely. This is where reliability engineers make a significant impact and add real value.
As industries have grown more complex, the field of reliability engineering has diversified into specialized roles depending on where and how the principles are applied, whether across the product life cycle, in production processes, or in software development. Let us look at the main focus areas.
1. Asset Reliability Engineering
This role is also called Equipment Reliability Engineering, Maintenance Reliability Engineering, Plant Reliability Engineering or even Manufacturing Reliability Engineering. The focus is on already designed, manufactured, and commercialized assets working in the field or in production facilities.
This is where I started my career. As an asset reliability engineer, your responsibility is to ensure the assets under your supervision work reliably and fulfill their intended functions consistently. You do this through effective maintenance programs.
A maintenance program is the tool, but the work behind it is much broader. It requires:
- continuous assessment of field failure data
- building reliability models
- understanding failure patterns
- conducting investigations to develop programs that will help sustain the inherent reliability of the assets
👉 The key words here are INHERENT RELIABILITY and SUSTAIN.
Asset reliability engineers cannot improve inherent reliability unless they implement major design changes, which is usually out of scope once the asset has already been commercialized.
A personal experience: Years ago, when I was still doing asset reliability engineering, a certain type of gearbox was failing on all of our high pressure, high flow pump units. After my analysis, it was clear that the gearboxes were being operated at speeds higher than they were designed for. No maintenance program could solve this. The only viable and ineffective solution was scheduled or condition-based replacement.
We wanted to redesign the gearboxes with the help of our design group, but it did not work out. The reason was that anything connected to those gearboxes — shafts, power take-offs, and more — would also need redesigning, which would cost the company millions.
No Maintenance can improve the inherent reliability of an asset
Experiencing many similar cases made me realize how proactive design practices, by implementing reliability engineering principles during product development, could dramatically improve field reliability. That was when I said to myself: Why can I not influence design? Reliability seems most critical during design and development. That thought pushed me to transition into a reliability engineering role within product design and development, not maintenance.
Key skills for Equipment Reliability Engineers:
- Product knowledge. Know your product inside out: how it works, what its limits are, and its performance criteria. Without this, you cannot make a meaningful impact.
- Operational knowledge. Many failure modes are linked to operating conditions. Familiarity with operations is invaluable.
- Product testing knowledge. Even though testing here is not as advanced as in design reliability, you still need to know basic testing principles, how to design tests, strategies to surface hidden issues, how to collect and analyze data. Many times, a well-designed test helped me find root causes much faster.
- Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM). You should know various maintenance types such as reactive, preventive, and predictive, and when to apply each. Familiarity with the RCM process is extremely helpful.
- Statistical knowledge. You need to analyze data, build models, and use inference to build or improve maintenance programs.
- High communication skills. You work with diverse stakeholders often under operational and budget pressure. Cutting spare part budgets and skipping preventive maintenance to achieve production goals are common challenges. Maintenance is usually run by experienced technicians, and introducing engineering approaches requires clear communication of the value you bring.
2. Design Reliability Engineering
In industries like automotive, aerospace, electronics, and medical devices, a product’s reliability is determined long before production. Design reliability engineers are part of the product design and development team. Their mission is to make sure reliability is built into the product from the very beginning. This role is also called product reliability engineering.
They help designers make informed decisions, what material to choose, which geometry to use, how to balance performance and durability, how to make it safer, etc. Their work impacts:
- the product’s life in the customer’s hands
- the warranty cost for the company
- the maintenance and operational costs for the user
There are many overlaps with equipment reliability engineering, and I can confirm this since I shifted from one to the other. But the skillsets differ in significant ways. Design reliability engineers have a proactive role, embedding reliability into the product from concept development through commercialization.
Reliability here is not just technical. It directly shapes brand reputation. Companies like Toyota have built their name and billions in revenue on reliability and quality both in design and production. Toyota has been the number one car seller in the United States for years, largely due to that reputation.
Key skills for Design Reliability Engineers:
- Product knowledge. The same as in equipment reliability, you need a deep understanding.
- Operational knowledge. Understanding real-world conditions is critical. The challenge here is uncertainty: field conditions often differ from lab conditions, so creative and robust solutions are key.
- Product Testing knowledge. Ability to design and analyze tests such as HALT, ALT, reliability growth, verification, and more.
- Strong statistical knowledge. Ability to analyze data, build models, make inferences, and convince stakeholders to invest resources.
- High communication skills. You need to justify reliability work to managers who are under constant pressure of schedule and budget. Selling the importance of these activities requires patience and persistence.
- Systems engineering knowledge. Reliability engineering is a specialized branch of systems engineering. Having a holistic systems perspective helps in understanding systems as a whole, their boundaries, interactions, and potential failure points.
- Knowledge of the product development process. From concept generation, requirements, detailed design, testing, to commercialization. Just as important as knowing what to do is knowing when to do it. Analysis that comes too late has no value for decision making.
- Knowledge of the Design for Reliability (DfR) process. This ensures reliability is built into the product from concept through demonstration.
- Knowledge of materials engineering and physics of failure. Understanding how materials behave under conditions such as temperature, pressure, and environment helps you collaborate effectively with design engineers.
3. Process Reliability Engineering
Moving from machines to processes, process reliability engineers focus on continuous or batch production environments such as chemicals, pharmaceuticals, oil refineries, semiconductor manufacturing, and food processing.
The focus is not on a single machine, but on ensuring that the entire production process runs reliably and efficiently.
Process reliability engineers:
- monitor variability
- detect subtle shifts in product quality, throughput, or yield
- identify where interventions can make the biggest impact
- install advanced process controls
- apply statistical quality control methods to minimize scrap and rework
They must be skilled in Six Sigma, lean manufacturing, and cross-functional collaboration, uniting operators, quality teams, and maintenance to achieve production excellence.
4. Software Reliability Engineering
Modern enterprises depend heavily on complex software systems, whether they are controlling industrial equipment or reusable rockets, running cloud platforms, or powering e-commerce. Software reliability engineers ensure these systems operate consistently, safely, and predictably, minimizing downtime and failures.
Although there are many differences between software and hardware reliability engineering, they also share some common fundamental principles. The required engineering backgrounds for these two fields, however, are not the same.
Unlike physical assets, software does not wear out. As a result, the failure patterns in these two domains are also different. Software failures usually occur because of design flaws, coding errors, integration problems, or unexpected interactions.
Software reliability engineers focus on:
- observability, automation, and resilience
- building monitoring systems with metrics, logs, and traces
- automating failover, recovery, and scaling
- implementing redundancy, practicing chaos testing, and simulating failures to understand weak points
As with hardware reliability engineering, strong collaboration with developers (design engineers), systems engineers, and operations teams is also critical in software reliability engineering, since it is an integrated responsibility.
Key skills for Software Reliability Engineers:
- Deep understanding of software development processes and lifecycle.
- Knowledge of software failure modes and how to prevent them.
- Strong statistical and modeling skills for reliability growth and defect prediction.
- Testing expertise. Stress testing, fault injection, regression testing, automated frameworks.
- Operational awareness of real-world software environments.
- Collaboration and communication skills across engineering disciplines.
Common Ground Across All Reliability Engineers
Despite their differences, all reliability engineers share a mindset. They are:
- Skilled domain engineers
- Systems thinkers
- Investigators
- Problem solvers
- Communicators
They look for patterns of weakness before they turn into costly failures.
What sets them apart is their sphere of influence:
- Asset reliability engineers focus on tangible machines, wear, fatigue, and failure modes.
- Process reliability engineers blend engineering with analytics to stabilize production.
- Design reliability engineers bridge R&D and operations, embedding reliability into products from the start.
- Software reliability engineers operate in the fast-moving digital frontier, where automation, rollback, and rapid recovery are essential.
Underlying all of them is a scientific, data-driven mindset and a passion for making things, physical or digital, work better, longer, safer, and more predictably.
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