Senior Manager, Global Fleet Reliability Operations

Applied Intuition, Inc. is powering the future of physical AI. Founded in 2017 and now valued at $15 billion, the Silicon Valley company is creating the digital infrastructure needed to bring intelligence to every moving machine on the planet. Applied Intuition services the automotive, defense, trucking, construction, mining and agriculture industries in three core areas: tools and infrastructure, operating systems, and autonomy. Eighteen of the top 20 global automakers, as well as the United States military and its allies, trust the company’s solutions to deliver physical intelligence. Applied Intuition is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, with offices in Washington, D.C.; San Diego; Ft. Walton Beach, Florida; Ann Arbor, Michigan; London; Stuttgart; Munich; Stockholm; Bangalore; Seoul; and Tokyo. Learn more at applied.co.

We are an in-office company, and our expectation is that full-time employees primarily work from their Applied Intuition office 5 days a week. However, we also recognize the importance of flexibility and trust our employees to manage their schedules responsibly. This may include occasional remote work, starting the day with morning meetings from home before heading to the office, or leaving earlier when needed to accommodate family commitments. This in-office expectation does not apply to contractor positions

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

Don’t meet every single requirement? If you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyway. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.

Applied Intuition is an equal opportunity employer and federal contractor or subcontractor. Consequently, the parties agree that, as applicable, they will abide by the requirements of 41 CFR 60-1.4(a), 41 CFR 60-300.5(a) and 41 CFR 60-741.5(a) and that these laws are incorporated herein by reference. These regulations prohibit discrimination against qualified individuals based on their status as protected veterans or individuals with disabilities, and prohibit discrimination against all individuals based on their race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or national origin. These regulations require that covered prime contractors and subcontractors take affirmative action to employ and advance in employment individuals without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, protected veteran status or disability. The parties also agree that, as applicable, they will abide by the requirements of Executive Order 13496 (29 CFR Part 471, Appendix A to Subpart A), relating to the notice of employee rights under federal labor laws.

FOR US-BASED ROLES: Applied Intuition is committed to providing an accessible and inclusive application and interview experience to applicants who are disabled veterans and other applicants with disabilities or medical conditions. Reasonable accommodations are available, requesting an accommodation will not affect your candidacy in any way, and you are not required to disclose the nature of your disability or medical condition in order to make a request. If you require an accommodation please contact careers@applied.co. We will work with you!

Department: Vehicle Operations