Senior Functional Safety Engineer (Hardware)

About the role

Join the team bringing advanced autonomy to the built world at Bedrock, where we’re moving AI out of the lab and into the real world. Our team comprises industry veterans who helped launch Waymo, scaled Segment to a $3.2B acquisition, and grew Uber Freight to $5B in revenue. We’re deploying autonomous systems on heavy construction machinery across the country, accelerating project schedules of billion-dollar infrastructure projects and improving safety on job sites. Backed by $350M in funding, we’re addressing the gap between America's surging demand for housing, data centers, manufacturing hubs, and the construction industry's labor shortage.

You’ll collaborate with construction veterans and world-class engineers to solve physical-world problems that simulations can’t touch. As a functional safety engineer, you’ll help define the functional and technical safety concept across the system, with a focus on hardware. You will work alongside the safety, hardware, and software teams to conduct safety analysis, develop diagnostics, generate fault metrics, and guide key system elements through the end-to-end safety lifecycle.

Responsibilities

• Help define the functional safety concept for the system
• Author technical safety concepts at the hardware level
• Partner with the hardware team to understand architectural requirements for future hardware platforms
• Author hardware safety requirements and drive the design of safety mechanisms
• Establish test plans for verification and validation of safety requirements
• Define test infrastructure and automation to support timely program execution
• Execute safety analysis such as HARA, FMEA, FMEDA, and FTA

Requirements

• BS or advanced degree in electrical, mechanical, systems, or a related engineering field, or equivalent practical experience
• 7+ years in safety-critical hardware or systems engineering, including several focused specifically on functional safety
• Direct experience in delivering functional safety work products according to ISO 13849, ISO 26262, IEC 61508, or similar
• Strong foundational knowledge in safety engineering techniques such as HARA, FMEA, FMEDA, FTA, and STPA
• Experience defining and executing verification & validation in a safety context, including fault injection and HIL testing
• Familiarity with design and implementation of safety mechanisms and fault handling measures, such as TMR, watchdogs, redundancy management, and graceful degradation
• Hands-on hardware background: you have designed, reviewed, brought up, debugged, or qualified electrical and electronic hardware yourself, not only assessed it from documents
• Working knowledge of functional safety standards ISO 13849, IEC 61508, IEC 62061, ISO 26262, ISO 25119, or ISO 19014 and how they apply to different systems and applications
• Strong experience with safety analysis
• Comfort with real-time and embedded systems, fail-safe and fail-operational architectures, and the failure modes of sensing and compute hardware
• Comfort working directly with hardware and test infrastructure to execute and debug safety features and tests

Skills

• Experience with autonomous systems
• Experience with system-level functional safety
• Hands-on certification or third-party assessment work (TÜV, UL, etc.)
• Experience standing up fault injection / HIL benches
• Background in sensing and compute: cameras, lidar, GNSS, IMUs
• Familiarity with heavy construction machines such as excavators, articulated dump trucks, dozers, wheel loaders, or motor graders

How we work

We are a startup, so we look for engineers with an appetite for agility. We do not compromise on safety and still find ways to move extremely fast. In practice, that means we prefer a sharp, quantified argument about one real hazard over an exhaustive document nobody reads. Our roles are often flexible—if you don’t fit all the criteria or are in another location (especially where we have an office, like SF or NY), please apply anyway!