Staff Engineer, Systems Safety (R4823)

Shield AI•San Diego, CA

About The Position

This role is hands-on and highly collaborative, requiring experience with safety-critical software systems and familiarity with airborne software safety processes (DO-178C, ARP4761, ARP4754A, and/or MIL-HDBK-516C). It requires strong software system intuition, and a software engineering background. You will serve as a safety authority across the Hivemind platform team, ensuring that safety considerations are built into architecture decisions, requirements, code, and verification strategies from the outset - not bolted on at the end.

Requirements

Bachelorâs degree with approximately 7+ years of relevant experience, or Masterâs degree with approximately 5+ years of relevant experience, in Systems Engineering, Software Engineering, or a closely related technical field with demonstrated experience on safety-critical airborne software.
Experience working within or applying safety-critical standards (e.g., DO-178C, MIL-HDBK-516C, ARP4754A, ARP4761)
Experience deriving safety requirements and allocating them to software components at defined criticality levels.
Experience in software development workflows in modern languages (C++, Python, Go, etc.) and software engineering practices, including CI/CD, automated testing, configuration management, and software lifecycle processes.
Familiarity with requirements management tools such as DOORS, Jama, or Jira, and with maintaining traceability across a safety software lifecycle.
Experience working cross-functionally with software engineers, test engineers, and product managers in a fast-paced, mission-critical environment.
Strong organizational, communication, and cross-functional collaboration skills; ability to translate safety obligations into actionable engineering guidance

Nice To Haves

Familiarity with MBSE practices and system modeling tools (Cameo, SysML) as applied to safety-critical architectures.
Prior experience with military airworthiness authority (USAF, Army, Navy) coordination.
Exposure to autonomy or robotic software systems and the safety challenges unique to non-deterministic or ML-enabled components.
Experience creating software tooling to automate safety data management
Hands-on experience working with CI/CD pipelines, automated test frameworks, and build systems to design and implement development workflows that continuously generate verifiable evidence of system behavior and support certification objectives.

Responsibilities

Safety requirements development:
Derive and author safety requirements from system-level hazard analyses, functional hazard assessments (FHAs), and customer/regulatory safety objectives.
Translate safety requirements into clear, testable software requirements aligned with the appropriate Design Assurance Level (DAL) or software criticality classification.
Collaborate with requirements engineers, system architects, product managers, software developers, and test engineers to ensure safety requirements flow consistently and traceably through product and component requirements.
Requirements traceability and verification support:
Maintain bidirectional traceability from safety requirements through design, implementation, and verification.
Collaborate with QA and test teams to define verification strategies, review test cases for safety coverage, and confirm that safety requirements are demonstrably satisfied prior to release.
Documentation and modeling:
Author clear, well-structured safety documentation and contribute to system models (SysML/MBSE) with a safety lens - capturing safety-relevant behavior, failure propagation paths, and mitigations.
Produce artifacts that are defensible to airworthiness authorities and understandable to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Hazard and safety analysis:
Lead and support safety analysis activities including Functional Hazard Assessments (FHA), Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA), Fault Tree Analysis (FTA), and Failure Mode and Effects Summary (FMES) for Hivemind software components and autonomy pipelines.
Identify safety-relevant failure conditions, assess severity, and drive mitigation strategies into the system architecture.
Cross-stack safety integration:
Work closely with engineers across the full product stack - including foundational software, autonomy and AI algorithms, simulation and test infrastructure, and GUI layers - to ensure safety requirements are correctly allocated to software components and that the system architecture supports safe operation under both nominal and off-nominal conditions.
Certification Evidence Support:
Collaborate with teams to ensure that process adherence, artifact completeness, and traceability are continuously demonstrated through development artifacts rather than assessed solely through manual reviews.
Support the generation, organization, and validation of certification evidence, ensuring it is accurate, complete, and defensible for internal and external airworthiness assessments