Staff Robotics System Safety Engineer

Roboticsconnected; Mountain View (WY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 300,000; Full time

Job summary

Rhoda AI is building advanced generalist humanoid robots with a complete robotics stack. We seek a senior safety engineer to lead safety-related features and verify system-level safety across architecture, testing, and certification.

You will derive requirements, design fail-safe and fail-operational strategies, and work with engineering teams to implement robust safety cases for complex electromechanical systems.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of mass-produced electromechanical product development experience.
• Data collection/analysis using Python or statistical tools.
• Proven experience in systems safety engineering (HARA, DFMEA, FTA, STPA).
• Experience with safety cases for complex electromechanical robotic systems.
• Proven track record from inception to mass production including safety certification.

Responsibilities

• Develop safety-related features for RhodavAI humanoid robot.
• Derive requirements related to stopping, collision avoidance, sensing, motor control and diagnostics.
• Define fail-safe, fail-degraded and fail-operational architectures.
• Drive requirements from inception to verification and approval to implementation.
• Create instrumentation/verification equipment to derive and verify requirements and diagnostics strategies.
• Provide hands-on support to System Integration and Applications teams.
• Collaborate with Mechanical, Electrical, Software and Applications teams.

Skills

Mass-produced products

Data collection & analysis

Systems safety engineering

Safety certifications

Deriving safety requirements

Test case design & fault injection

Education

B.S. in Robotics/Mechatronics/EE/CS

Job description

At Rhoda AI, we're building the next generation of generalist intelligent robots. We own the full robotics stack from high-performance hardware and robot systems to the infrastructure and state-of-the-art foundation world models that control our robots. Our robots are designed to be generalists capable of operating in complex, real-world environments and handling long-tail edge cases, made possible by our cutting edge research and end-to-end system design. We've raised over $450M and are investing aggressively in model research, infrastructure, hardware development, and manufacturing scale-up to make generalist robotics a reality.

Job duties

• Develop safety-related features of RhodavAI humanoid robot
• Derive by analysis and/or empirically requirements related to stopping, collision avoidance, collision sensing, motor control and diagnostics
• Define fail-safe, fail-degraded and fail-operational strategies and required architectures
• Drive requirements from inception to approval to implementation to verification
• Invent, implement and use custom instrumentation and verification equipment for the purpose of deriving, verifying requirements and developing diagnostics strategies
• Hands-on support of System Integration and Application Engineering teams
• Work closely with Mechanical, Electrical, Software and Applications teams

Requirements:

• 10+ years mass-produced electromechanical product development experience
• B.S. in Robotics, Mechatronics, Electrical Engineering or Computer Science
• Data collection and analysis methodologies - data acquisition and instrumentation, data conversion and analysis using Python or statistical tools, data presentation
• Proven experience in systems safety engineering, including HARA, DFMEA, FTA, STPA and safety case development for complex electromechanical systems with significant robotic aspect
• Proven track record of complex safety-critical product development from inception to mass production, including passing through safety certification
• Proven experience deriving safety requirements for a robotic system through analysis and experimentation
• Proven experience in developing test cases with fault injection, instrumenting and executing those test cases, analyzing data and presenting to cross-functional teams to argue for a passing result or a pivot in design or test methodology
• Proven experience working in at least of one of the three basic disciplines: Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Software Engineering

Nice to have

• Certification from TUV Rheinland or similar in Functional Safety ( IEC 61508 or Machinery)
• Experience in AI safety for Physical AI
• In-depth understanding of autonomy sensor methods - vision, TOF, laser, etc
• In-depth understanding of motor control
• In-depth understanding of safety-critical embedded systems electronics, firmware and software
• Significant experience developing, characterizing or troubleshooting various electric and pneumatic actuators
• Experience designing and deploying robotic solutions for industrial manufacturing
• Experience with robotics more than one industry, among surgical, aerospace, automotive, mining, earth-moving, agricultural, home and commercial service robots
• M.S. Engineering degree