Staff Robotics System Safety Engineer

System Safety; Mountain View (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

Rhoda AI in Mountain View, CA seeks a seasoned Systems Safety Engineer to lead the safety architecture of RhodavAI humanoid robots. You will derive safety requirements, develop DFMEA/FTA/STPA, and drive from concept to certification.

Collaborate with mechanical, electrical, software, and applications teams to build fail-safe and fail-operational strategies.

Qualifications

• Must have safety engineering experience for complex electromechanical systems with robotic aspects.
• Experience deriving safety requirements through analysis and experimentation.
• Experience with safety certification processes for mass-produced systems.
• Strong data collection/analysis skills using Python or statistics.

Responsibilities

• Develop safety-related features of RhodavAI humanoid robot.
• Derive safety requirements via analysis/empiricism for stopping, collision avoidance, sensing, motor control, diagnostics.
• Define fail-safe, fail-degraded, and fail-operational architectures.
• Drive requirements from inception to verification/approval.
• Create instrumentation and verification tools for deriving and validating requirements.

Skills

Safety engineering

Python data analysis

Instrumentation

DFMEA/FTA/STPA

Cross-functional collaboration

Electrical/Mechanical/Software

Education

B.S. in Robotics, Mechatronics, Electrical Engineering or Computer Science

M.S. Engineering degree

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