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Salary: USD 170,000 - 215,000 / annual
Atoms is building Physical AI—real-world robots for industries including food, mining, and transport. The company integrates hardware, software, AI, operations, and manufacturing to deploy autonomous systems into real environments at scale.
As a Field Test Engineer, you will own the end-to-end execution of vehicle and autonomous system testing, from scenario planning through final reporting. Your responsibilities include:
• Planning and executing test scenarios at proving grounds and public roads, translating specifications into detailed test procedures, setting up instrumented targets and vehicles, defining approach conditions and tolerance bands, and running sufficient valid test iterations to support defensible results.
• Managing safety for all testing operations: site layout, personnel positioning, exclusion zones, emergency stop provisions, weather and surface limits. You hold the authority and responsibility to stop tests when conditions warrant.
• Owning instrumentation and ground truth data: ego positioning, target position and velocity, timing synchronization, video and data acquisition. Every run must be fully reconstructable from its data to constitute valid evidence.
• Defining and enforcing tolerance bands, determining the number of valid runs required for a result, and rejecting runs that fall outside specifications with documented reasons. Your rigor here directly supports downstream safety case engineering.
• Writing test reports suitable for citation in safety cases and regulatory arguments: clear documentation of what was run, under what conditions, against what criteria, with what outcome, and every deviation from procedure. Reports must be understandable to readers who were not present.
• Managing proving ground scheduling, test equipment calibration, and third-party test service relationships, including practical knowledge of venue capabilities and limitations.
• Identifying gaps in test specifications: reporting what is not testable as specified, what required adaptation, and what no available venue can stage. You surface specification defects early.
• Leveraging AI tooling to reduce manual work: auto-generated test procedures from case specifications, automated validity checking of runs against tolerance bands (catching invalid runs at the track rather than in post-analysis), and report generation from acquisition data.
Requirements:
• 5+ years of hands-on vehicle test engineering, including ADAS or AV testing, proving ground operations, or OEM/Tier 1 vehicle test experience. Must have direct experience running tests, not just planning them.
• Hands-on proficiency with test equipment: instrumented targets (soft cars, pedestrian/cyclist targets), driving robots, RTK/GNSS ground truth systems, timing synchronization, and data acquisition systems.
• Experience executing published test procedures (Euro NCAP, NHTSA crash-avoidance, or equivalent) and judgment to adapt procedures written for human-driven vehicles.
• Demonstrated rigor about test validity: you reject out-of-tolerance runs and record reasons without prompting or pressure.
• Safety-of-test judgment: you have stopped tests or refused to start them, and can articulate the decision rationale. Ability to stage deliberate hazards safely.
• Data analysis capability in Python or similar languages; comfortable processing acquisition data and producing defensible results rather than handing off raw logs.
• Comfort with AI tooling for procedure drafting, validity checks, and report generation, with clear understanding of tool limitations (a run either happened as specified or it did not; no tool can decide marginal cases).
• Clear written communication skills. Your reports become cited evidence in regulatory and safety arguments; reports must be followable by readers not present at testing.
• Willingness to travel regularly to proving grounds and test routes, and flexibility to work hours aligned with test windows and weather conditions.
