Senior System Safety Engineer - Perception

Rhoda AI • Mountain View, CA

5d • $175,000 - $250,000

About The Position

At Rhoda AI, the Senior System Safety Engineer - Perception owns safety requirements and safety evidence for the robot’s perception path, end to end—from sensors and their data links, through detection and decision logic, to the robot’s response. The role ensures the path is deterministic, auditable, explainable, and meets its safety targets. Rhoda AI builds generalist intelligent robots, developing its own robotics stack across hardware, robot systems, infrastructure, and foundation world models.

Requirements

• Expertise in deterministic, auditable, explainable computer vision algorithms used for perception.
• Experience deriving engineering requirements analytically and empirically, with numerical pass/fail constraints tied to physical performance such as distance, time, and speed.
• A proven record of developing SOTIF work products for a safety-related robotic or automotive system.
• Experience creating calibration fixtures, defining calibration processes, and driving failure and trend analysis of field data.
• Experience deriving and allocating error budgets, and developing data-backed analyses to inform trade studies and achieve compliance with error budgets.
• Strong background in safety-critical embedded software, real-time operating systems, computer vision algorithms, and safety-compliant C/C++ development.
• Experience with Lidars, Cameras, Time-of-Flight sensors, Radars, Ultrasonics, other sensing technologies, and related sensor pipeline hardware and state-of-the-art methodologies used in a safety-related context.

Nice To Haves

• MS or PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or Robotics, with a focus on Computer Vision and Embedded Systems.
• Experience creating Functional Safety and SOTIF work products and successfully passing an audit by an NRTL.
• Experience with safety-rated compute hardware with strong vision processing capabilities.
• Experience designing safety architectures and documenting requirements within the context of IEC 61508 or ISO 26262.
• Experience with embedded software systems developed in compliance with MISRA C, ISO 26262-6, or IEC 61508-3.
• Perception sensors Functional Safety background from the automotive industry.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end safety targets and performance for perception algorithms used in the robot’s collision avoidance system, and develop evidence that the design meets those targets.
• Derive system safety requirements through engineering analysis for detection performance, classification accuracy, KPIs, malfunction identification and mitigation, performance degradation, and edge cases.
• Develop detection and mitigation strategies within the SOTIF framework, and own SOTIF performance from requirements development through analysis of verification and validation test data.
• Set safety requirements for calibration accuracy, drift detection, and recalibration triggers, and analyze data for trends and drift.
• Set safety limits for the sensor-to-actuator error budget, check that allocations remain within those limits, and contribute to trade studies that influence hardware and software designs.
• Create the safety concept and implementation requirements, working closely with the Software Engineering team to achieve safety-compliant software implementation.
• Define safety requirements for safety-related sensors, including diagnostics, fault detection, and failure rates; review supplier safety manuals; contribute to sensor selection; specify qualification evidence; and drive verification.
• Generate work products for the Robot Safety Case and drive reviews and approvals with an NRTL.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed