With the development of science and technology, the structure of engineering system has become increasingly large and complex. In order to ensure the safety and stability of the system in operation, the reliability evaluation of complex system has become an important research field. Based on the actual engineering system, this paper proposes a multi-state system with multi-level performance sharing mechanism. On this basis, we established a system reliability evaluation model using universal generating function technique. Through numerical examples, the application of the model and analyze the influence of different parameters on system reliability are demonstrated. In addition, we also use genetic algorithm to optimize the allocation of components in the system, so as to improve the reliability of the system. Different from the previous studies on system reliability with common bus performance sharing, the system proposed in this study is more general.