SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Salary: USD 182,000 - 238,000 / annual
Atoms is building Physical AI—real-world robots for industries including food, mining, and transport. This role owns the functional safety analysis of the automated vehicle platform and sensor suite, determining what can fail, how failures manifest, what the system does about them, and whether responses are adequate.
You will conduct hazard analysis and risk assessment for the platform, deriving safety goals and requirements, driving them into architecture, and maintaining traceability from hazard to requirement to verification evidence. You'll lead fault and failure analysis across compute, power, actuation interfaces, and the sensor suite, covering both hard faults and degraded modes. You own sensor suite safety—sensing sufficiency, degradation under adverse conditions, and fault detection and handling.
A critical responsibility is determining the safety impact of change. Hardware revisions, sensor swaps, software releases, new platform variants, and operating domain changes all affect the safety argument; you decide what each costs. You'll own the change impact assessment process—what triggers assessment, what depth each change class warrants, what evidence clears it, and what escalates—while keeping it fast enough to stay on the critical path.
You'll establish the method that safety case engineers work from: reusable analysis structures they adapt to their scope, a library of platform-level safety items they reference instead of re-deriving, and queryable hazard-to-evidence traceability. You'll ship tooling they run themselves—change-impact triage that flags which arguments a change touches, automated traceability checks, and detection of stale arguments.
The role is expected to leverage AI tooling purpose-built to accelerate safety analysis: failure mode generation, gap checking across large analyses, and interrogation of requirements and standards corpora. You'll use these as working instruments in analysis itself, build your own tooling rather than filing tickets, and maintain rigor about boundaries—generated failure modes are hypotheses to verify, never evidence. Safety claims require human judgment and traceable justification.
Atoms is based in San Francisco with five-day-per-week onsite work. The company is driven by invention and continuous change, reimagining industries and building new products.
**Requirements:**
- 8+ years in functional safety for automotive, automated vehicles, aerospace, industrial automation, or another safety-critical hardware domain, with deep hands-on analysis experience rather than process oversight alone
- Demonstrated ownership of HARA, FMEA, and FTA on real systems that shipped; willingness to discuss specific analyses you have authored in depth
- Strong standards fluency: ISO 26262, ISO 21448 (SOTIF), and UL 4600, with judgment to apply them proportionately rather than performing compliance theater
- Experience making release-gating safety calls under time pressure with incomplete information; ability to explain both your framework and a time you got it wrong
- Real hardware and electrical depth: sensors, actuation interfaces, power and grounding, wiring, EMC, redundancy architecture; comfort at the vehicle with a schematic and a scope
- Programming ability—Python or similar—sufficient to analyze field data, build your own tooling, and work fluently with an AI coding assistant
- Track record of building something other engineers used—a tool, script, template, or pipeline that colleagues adopted because it beat what they had
- Temperament to serve internal customers without being captured by them; your job is to give them something correct and fast, not something accommodating
**Nice to have:**
- Experience authoring or defending a safety case to an external party (customer, regulator, assessor, or insurer)
- Functional safety certification such as TÜV FSEng, or equivalent demonstrated depth
- Experience with fault injection frameworks, HIL, or automated safety verification pipelines
