Senior Functional Safety Engineer — Automotive ECUs

System Safety; Palo Alto, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity RSUs

Comprehensive benefits

Job summary

Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies is seeking an experienced hardware safety engineer to design and implement safety requirements for ECUs and hardware subsystems. You will work with cross‑functional teams to apply functional safety methods and derive safety concepts that balance reliability and performance.

The role emphasizes developing verification strategies, conducting FMEDA/FTA analyses, and documenting safety activities across sub-systems to meet regulatory standards.

Qualifications

• 3-5+ years of relevant experience with functional safety design in automotive, industrial or aerospace.
• Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering or equivalent.
• Experience with ISO 26262:2018 Part 5 and Part 11 or IEC 61508 Parts 1–3.
• Ability to work with cross-functional teams including hardware, software, mechanical, manufacturing.

Responsibilities

• Design and implementation of technical safety requirements at the hardware level.
• Work with cross functional teams and hardware design engineers to implement hardware safety requirements.
• Work with various functional safety analysis methods (FTA, FMEDA) supporting hardware architectural design.
• Apply essential experience in functional safety to derive Safety requirements, technical safety concepts, FMEDA (Failure Mode Effects & Diagnostic Analysis), FTA (Fault Tree Analysis), DFA (Dependent Failure Analysis) and PMHF to meet functional safety requirements.
• Develop verification and validation methods to support testing of hardware safety requirements.
• Write test procedures and support testing of hardware sub‑systems.
• Document all relevant safety requirements, analysis, architecture implementation, verification, and validation events for each sub‑system.

Skills

Functional safety design

Electrical engineering

Safety analysis

Cross-functional teamwork

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering

Tools

FMEDA

FTA

DFA

IEC 61508

Job description

Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies is seeking an experienced hardware safety engineer to design and implement safety requirements for ECUs and hardware subsystems. You will work with cross‑functional teams to apply functional safety methods and derive safety concepts that balance reliability and performance.

The role emphasizes developing verification strategies, conducting FMEDA/FTA analyses, and documenting safety activities across sub-systems to meet regulatory standards.