Functional Safety Lead - AI-Driven Real-World Robotics

Cssmerge; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 182,000 - 238,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Onsite in SF

Medical benefits

Job summary

Atoms is seeking a senior functional safety engineer for our AI-native automated vehicle platform in San Francisco. You will own hazard analysis, risk assessment, and safety-case development across hardware, software, and sensor suites, ensuring traceability to verification evidence.

You’ll determine the safety impact of changes, lead fault analysis, and build reusable tooling to scale safety work across teams while collaborating with hardware and software engineers to ship safe systems.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in functional safety for automotive or safety-critical hardware.
• Ownership of HARA, FMEA, and FTA on real systems that shipped.
• Strong standards fluency: ISO 26262, ISO 21448 (SOTIF), and UL 4600.

Responsibilities

• Own hazard analysis and risk assessment for the platform — derive safety goals and requirements, drive them into the architecture, and maintain traceability from hazard to requirement to verification evidence.
• Lead fault and failure analysis across the platform — compute, power and actuation interfaces — and across the sensor suite, covering both hard faults and degraded modes.
• Own sensor suite safety: sensing sufficiency and degradation — what coverage exists, how it erodes under adverse conditions, and how faults are detected and handled.
• Determine the safety impact of change. Hardware revisions, sensor swaps, software releases, new platform variants and changes to the operating domain all move the safety argument, and you decide what each one costs.
• Own change impact assessment — what triggers an assessment, what depth each class of change warrants, what evidence clears it, and what escalates — and keep it fast enough to stay on the critical path.
• Own the method the safety case engineers work from: reusable analysis structures they adapt to their own scope, a library of platform-level safety items they reference instead of re-deriving, and queryable hazard-to-evidence traceability.
• Ship tooling they run themselves rather than analysis you run for them — change-impact triage that flags which arguments a given change touches, automated traceability checks, and detection of where an argument has gone stale.

Skills

Functional safety

Safety standards

Python programming

Hardware familiarity

Fault analysis

Tooling development

Education

Functional safety certification

Tools

HIL

Fault injection frameworks

Automation pipelines

Job description

Atoms is seeking a senior functional safety engineer for our AI-native automated vehicle platform in San Francisco. You will own hazard analysis, risk assessment, and safety-case development across hardware, software, and sensor suites, ensuring traceability to verification evidence.

You’ll determine the safety impact of changes, lead fault analysis, and build reusable tooling to scale safety work across teams while collaborating with hardware and software engineers to ship safe systems.