Field Robotics Autonomy Engineer – Safety

FieldAI; Irvine (CA); On-site; USD 100,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

FieldAI’s Irvine team designs embodied AI systems for real robots, combining rigorous engineering with field deployments. As the Robotics Autonomy Engineer – Safety, you will own and advance the independent safety layer ensuring safe operation across diverse platforms.

You will craft monitors, enforce limits, and develop fallback behaviors while collaborating with planning, control, and integration teams to verify safety in simulation and real-world field trials.

Qualifications

• Master’s degree or higher in Robotics, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related field, or a Bachelor’s degree with substantial hands‑on experience on safety related autonomous systems
• 2+ years of experience developing safety, monitoring, or fallback systems for robots or autonomous vehicles
• Strong grounding in classical planning and control, such as collision checking and trajectory validation
• Experience writing deterministic, real time, resource bounded C++ for systems where correctness matters more than features
• Solid Python skills for tooling, analysis, and test automation in Linux-based environments
• A verification mindset: you think in terms of assumptions, failure modes, coverage, and evidence
• Familiarity with safety standards for mobile robots and autonomous systems (e.g., ISO 13482, ISO 3691-4, ISO 26262)
• Familiarity with robotics middleware such as ROS/ROS 2, and with robot sensors such as LiDAR, depth cameras, and IMUs

Responsibilities

• Own and evolve the safety layer that runs independently of perception, planning, and learned policies, and extend it to new wheeled, legged, and humanoid platforms
• Build runtime monitors and collision avoidance backstops that check every commanded motion against the environment before it reaches the robot
• Enforce speed, zone, terrain, and proximity limits, and define the safe operating envelope for each platform and deployment
• Design fallback and minimal risk behaviors, from graceful slow down to safe stop, and the logic that decides when to trigger them
• Build watchdogs and health monitoring across sensors, compute, communication, and actuation, so the robot always knows when it can trust itself
• Lead hazard analysis and safety case development for new platforms and new deployments
• Verify the safety layer in simulation, hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testing, and field trials, with coverage that grows with every deployment
• Work with planning, control, locomotion, and integration teams so the nominal stack plans and moves within the safety envelope

Skills

Real-time C++

Python tooling

ROS/ROS 2

Safety monitoring

Hazard analysis

Verification & validation

Control theory basics

ML safety concepts

Education

Master’s degree in Robotics/CS/EE or related

Bachelor’s with hands-on safety autonomous systems

Tools

ROS/ROS 2

LiDAR sensors

Job description

FieldAI’s Irvine team designs embodied AI systems for real robots, combining rigorous engineering with field deployments. As the Robotics Autonomy Engineer – Safety, you will own and advance the independent safety layer ensuring safe operation across diverse platforms.

You will craft monitors, enforce limits, and develop fallback behaviors while collaborating with planning, control, and integration teams to verify safety in simulation and real-world field trials.