Senior Systems Engineer - Autonomous, Safety-Critical

Apera; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Apera in San Francisco is seeking a Senior Systems Engineer to lead the development and deployment of high-reliability autonomous systems in safety-critical environments. You will own system-level design across hardware, software, controls, and certification, influencing how systems are built, tested, and deployed.

You will drive requirements, interfaces, and trade studies, manage risk-based margins, and collaborate across engineering disciplines to scale robust engineering processes as the

Qualifications

• BS and/or MS in Aerospace Engineering, Systems Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering or a related discipline.
• 5-10+ years of industry experience developing safety-critical electromechanical systems.
• Experience with systems or vehicle-level design across disciplines.
• Proven ability to solve multidisciplinary engineering problems and drive to resolution.
• Experience using engineering tools such as modelling, simulation, statistics to investigate problems.
• Knowledge of designing systems for challenging environments including temperature extremes, vibration, ESD, and high electrical noise.
• Understanding of fail-safe and fail-operational architectures.
• Comfortable working with energy budgets, flight dynamics, reliability, and risk-based thresholds.
• Experience developing or implementing systems engineering processes in new programs or scaling environments.
• Strong communication skills and influence across disciplines.

Responsibilities

• Act as a technical expert in deploying high-reliability autonomous systems into safety-critical environments, owning requirements, metrics, test coverage, and validation processes to ensure safe and robust system performance.
• Own system and subsystem requirements, including definition, decomposition, allocation, and traceability.
• Define system interfaces and work across engineering disciplines to establish and manage technical budgets.
• Develop frameworks and facilitate trade studies to optimise system architecture and operational decisions across performance, safety, reliability, and cost.
• Evaluate hardware and software release standards, verification strategies, and test requirements.
• Work closely with design engineering, systems engineering, test, and certification teams to demonstrate system safety and readiness for deployment.
• Identify complex technical risks and develop practical, data-driven solutions across multidisciplinary engineering teams.
• Help establish and continuously improve systems engineering processes as the organisation scales.

Skills

Systems modelling

Simulation

Statistical analysis

Cross-disciplinary collaboration

Strong communication

Problem solving

Education

BS/MS in Aerospace Engineering or related

Job description

Apera in San Francisco is seeking a Senior Systems Engineer to lead the development and deployment of high-reliability autonomous systems in safety-critical environments. You will own system-level design across hardware, software, controls, and certification, influencing how systems are built, tested, and deployed.

You will drive requirements, interfaces, and trade studies, manage risk-based margins, and collaborate across engineering disciplines to scale robust engineering processes as the