Safety Operations Lead

Atoms•San Francisco, CA

9d•$182,000 - $230,000•Onsite

About The Position

Atoms is building the machines that power the next era of progress. Our safety practice is not a document exercise — it is an operating discipline that has to run at the speed of the fleet. This role owns that discipline. You will stand up and run the operational safety machinery: how we manage incidents, how we train and qualify the people in and around our vehicles, how field events get triaged and routed, and how investigations turn into engineering change. Today these functions exist on a smaller scale. Your job is to make them a coherent system that scales as we add vehicles, routes, and customers. This is a hands-on role. You will write the next version of most of these processes yourself, run the first dozen investigations yourself, and only then hire against the parts that need scale.

Requirements

8+ years in safety operations, fleet safety, transportation safety, or operational risk in a safety-critical domain — commercial trucking, autonomous vehicles, rail, aviation, or industrial operations.
Demonstrated experience leading real incident investigations to root cause and driving corrective actions to closure.
Fluency with structured investigation and risk methods — root cause analysis, causal factor charting, human factors analysis, hazard identification — and the judgment to know which one a given event actually warrants.
Experience designing training for operational staff, including practical evaluation and qualification decisions.
Data-driven by default. You are comfortable working directly with event data: querying it, building your own views, and forming a defensible position from it.
SQL and basic scripting are expected; you should not need an analyst to tell you what the fleet is doing.
Working knowledge of the US vehicle regulatory environment, — AV-specific reporting such as the NHTSA Standing General Order, FMCSA regulations, hours of service.
Familiarity with SAE J3016 levels and ODD concepts.
The disposition this work requires: calm under a live incident, rigorous when it would be easier to be reassuring, and willing to be the person who says stop.
Willingness to be on-site and on-call. Incidents do not respect business hours.

Nice To Haves

Direct AV or commercial fleet experience is a strong plus but not a hard requirement.
Experience at an AV developer or an operator running AV pilots on public roads.
Experience building a safety function from a near-blank slate rather than inheriting a mature one.
Exposure to safety management systems, safety case development, or aviation-style safety assurance practice.
Experience preparing safety material for regulators or insurers.

Responsibilities

Own the end-to-end response process: detection, notification, severity classification, on-scene coordination, containment decisions, root cause investigation, corrective action, and closure.
Recommend who should have the authority to hold operations and under what conditions, and make sure that authority is real.
Build the pipeline that turns raw field telemetry, disengagements, operator reports, and near-miss data into a ranked, actionable queue.
Set the taxonomy and severity model for event triage.
Own the triage rate, the backlog, and the time-to-disposition — and make those numbers visible to engineering and leadership.
Lead investigations of collisions, disengagements, and anomalous behavior.
Drive investigations to a defensible causal account, not a narrative.
Track corrective actions through to verified closure.
Design the training and recurrent-qualification program for safety drivers, autonomous vehicle operators, and remote support staff.
Own the curriculum, the practical evaluation, and the qualification records for training.
Own the operational safety metrics set and the reporting cadence, and make sure our internal records can withstand outside scrutiny.
Be the channel that carries field reality into the product.
Partner with the Head of Safety so that operational evidence feeds hazard analysis and change assessment rather than sitting in a separate system.