Product Safety Engineer

Waymo•San Francisco, CA

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

Waymo’s Safety team promotes and continuously improves the safety of its fully autonomous driving technology. The team develops safety goals and strategies, performs safety engineering analyses throughout vehicle design and development, and works with external stakeholders on autonomous-vehicle safety strategies and policies. It also advises on compliance with applicable environmental, health, and safety regulations. In this hybrid role, the Product Safety Engineer manages autonomous-vehicle product safety risks other than collision risk. The role covers risk discovery, evaluation, escalation, mitigation, and acceptance. The engineer works with systems, hardware, software, and operations experts to create robust risk assessments that can be executed sustainably and adapted as product scope expands. The role also develops evaluation frameworks, acceptance criteria, and risk-assessment best practices, and translates probabilistic models and statistical analyses into clear safety arguments for technical leaders, partners, and safety review boards. The engineer helps strengthen safety culture and continuously improve Waymo’s safety program across engineering and operations.

Requirements

Advanced degree in Computer Science, Robotics, Engineering, or another relevant technical field, or four years of practical experience involving safety risk assessments and systems engineering.
Proven experience managing product risk for physical products or services using quantitative or semi-quantitative risk models.
Strong foundation in end-to-end risk management, including risk identification, assessment, mitigation, and acceptance, such as under ISO 31000/31010 or equivalent standards.
Solid understanding of safety-critical system design and the systems engineering Verification and Validation process.
Demonstrated technical project management skills, including managing multiple parallel, cross-functional safety-critical projects and teams.
Ability to thrive in ambiguity.

Nice To Haves

Deep product-safety background spanning physical product design, human-machine interfaces, and services.
Experience in system safety risk management in autonomous vehicles, aerospace, defense, robotics, rail, or medical-device industries.
Experience using user studies, data science, and testing to develop quantitative risk-reduction solutions, provide safety insights to leadership, and assess performance.
Success championing safety culture and influencing engineering culture so safety is a first-class consideration in design discussions.
Experience mentoring or training engineering teams on safety-by-design and safety principles.
Proven leadership working with external partners, contractors, suppliers, and regulatory bodies or auditors.

Responsibilities

Manage autonomous-vehicle product safety risks other than collision risk, including discovery, evaluation, escalation, mitigation, and acceptance.
Partner with systems, hardware, software, and operations domain experts to develop robust, sustainable, and adaptable risk assessments.
Review proposed mitigations, write requirements and test coverage, and identify KPIs for field monitoring to ensure risk is sufficiently managed and regression protection is strong.
Propose an evaluation framework and acceptance criteria, drawing on industry practices and standards where applicable.
Develop best practices for risk-assessment methodologies and publish internal guidance on risk models, data sources, and computation methods.
Translate probabilistic risk models and statistical analyses into clear, actionable safety arguments and executive summaries for technical leaders, cross-functional partners, and safety review boards.
Promote a robust safety culture and continuous improvement of the Waymo safety program across engineering and operations.