Senior System Safety Engineer
AeroVect · South, VA · Yesterday
On-siteEngineeringFull-time
About the Role
AeroVect is transforming ground handling with autonomy, redefining how airlines and ground service providers around the globe run day-to-day operations. We are a Series A company backed by top-tier venture capital investors in aviation and autonomous driving. Our customers include some of the world’s largest airlines and ground handling providers.
Responsibilities
- Perform hazard identification and risk assessments (HARA, FMEA, FTA, STPA) on the autonomous system architecture and vehicle operation concepts.
- Derive, specify, and trace functional and technical safety requirements (FSRs / TSRs) for both supervised autonomy (safety driver present) and SDO unsupervised autonomy (driverless).
- Collaborate directly with systems, software, robotics, hardware, and test teams to ensure safety requirements are integrated, testable, and verified.
- Assist in building safety case artifacts and verification evidence required for airport commercial deployment.
- Perform Quantitative Hardware Safety Analyses, including FMEDA, hardware diagnostic coverage analysis, and Probabilistic Metric for random Hardware Failures (PMHF).
- Calculate hardware component and system failure rates using standard methodologies (SN 29500, IEC 61709, MIL-HDBK-217F, Telcordia SR-332).
- Evaluate drive-by-wire compute hardware, sensor suites (Lidar, Radar, Camera), actuator interfaces, and power distribution systems for single-point and latent faults.
- Derive Hardware Safety Requirements (HSRs) for redundant architectures and fail-operational compute nodes.
Requirements
- 5+ years of hands-on safety engineering experience in autonomous vehicles, automotive (ISO 26262), aerospace (DO-178C/DO-254), or industrial safety (IEC 61508).
- 5+ years in hardware safety engineering, EE reliability, or failure rate modeling for automotive, aerospace, or industrial robotics.
- Prior background working with autonomous driving systems or mobile robotics.
- Proven ability to work under the technical mentorship of a Principal Safety Engineer in a high-velocity agile engineering team.
- B.S. or M.S. in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Systems Engineering, Robotics, or a related discipline.
- Proven mastery of FIT rate modeling, component failure rate calculation methods (SN 29500, IEC 61709, MIL-HDBK-217), and FMEDA workflows.
- ISO 26262-5 Mastery: Deep knowledge of hardware architectural metrics (SPFM, LFM) and hardware diagnostic strategies.