Sensing and Perception System Safety Engineer

Zoox is on an ambitious journey to develop a full-stack autonomous mobility solution for cities and deploy such a robotaxi solution safely and reliably. The System Design and Mission Assurance (SDMA) team plays a foundational role in the company's success, responsible for constructing the safety case and fail-operational design for our autonomous driving robots before public road deployment. We are seeking a System Safety Engineer to perform safety analyses of complex hardware and software systems, specifically Sensing and Perception Systems. You will work across hardware and software domains to develop comprehensive system safety requirements and metrics that ensure safe, fail operational and reliable sensing capabilities for our autonomous vehicle platform.

In this role, you will:

• Define safety requirements for sensing (e.g. camera, lidar, radar) and perception (sensor fusion, ML models) subsystems

• Lead cross-functional technical projects across Software, Hardware, Operations, Data Science, V&V teams to ensure we have the appropriate data and solutions to support our safety arguments 

• Collaborate with perception, hardware, software, firmware and other systems engineering teams to design safety mechanisms by leveraging ISO 26262 (e.g HARAs, Functional Safety Concepts, etc.) and SOTIF (ISO 21448) standards

• Work with partner teams to develop safe, fail operational, and cost-optimized, next-generation sensing architectures and guide the selection of next-generation sensors

• Analyze field and simulation data to root cause issues, identify next steps or validate assumptions

• Leverage AI/LLM tools to accelerate analysis and automate repetitive processes, improving team efficiency

Qualifications

• BS or MS in a related technical field, such as Electrical/Electronics Engineering, Computer Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Computer Science, Robotics, Mechatronics, etc.

• Experience as a Design or Systems Engineer for complex or mission-critical systems with high levels of fail-operational redundancy especially in domain of sensing and perception

• 3+ years of hands-on systems, safety, or related engineering experience with a focus on analysis of safety critical high-integrity systems in Automotive, ADAS, Autonomous vehicles, Aerospace or Robotics industries

• Effective communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to articulate complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Bonus Qualifications

• Experience with sensing hardware, physics, limitations and tradeoffs especially in safety-critical applications and fail operational systems

• Experience in the application of ISO 26262 (Functional Safety) and ISO 21448 (SOTIF) to L2+ ADAS and autonomous vehicles; Experience with hazard analysis, functional decomposition, validation, and verification

• Experience with Python and/or Databricks for data mining, analysis and visualization

• Strong analytical skills in performance metrics definition and system-level trade-off analysis

• Understanding of modern perception stack, ML/AI systems and their requirements, and integration challenges

• Experience using requirements management tools such as Polarion (preferred), DOORS or Jama