What Reliability Engineers Are Asked to Do, What They Are Hired to Do, and the Gap Between
Reliability engineering, as a profession, is unusual in the breadth of activities that can legitimately fall within its role. The same job title in two different organisations can mean root cause analysis with a microscope and no laboratory, or cross-functional leadership across design, finance, marketing, and supply chain. The asymmetry between what the job title says and what the role requires is a recurring source of organisational friction, hiring failures, and engineer dissatisfaction. This paper sets out eight principles for setting and managing reliability engineering expectations: recognising the limits of generic job descriptions, calibrating the role to the organisation’s reliability maturity, securing the cross-functional access the role requires, communicating about expectations as an ongoing discipline rather than a one-time conversation, evolving the role as the business evolves, and building mentorship and learning environments that allow newly anointed reliability engineers to find their feet. The principles are drawn from a Speaking of Reliability conversation between Philip Sage and Fred Schenkelberg and have been translated here into a structured engineering doctrine in the TMG voice.