Senior Verification & Validation (V&V) Engineer - San Francisco

About the role

Join Polymath Robotics, a small, close-knit team of 20 experts working to bring autonomous vehicles to various industries. As a Senior V&V Engineer, you will own the verification and validation architecture for the autonomy stack, author test plans, and write Integrator Acceptance Tests (IATs).

Responsibilities

• Own verification and validation architecture across the autonomy stack — author field test plans, simulation test cases, and acceptance test suites that scale across every vehicle of a given model.
• Write Integrator Acceptance Tests (IATs) — the structured procedures handed to integration partners to run before vehicles are delivered to Polymath.
• Define acceptance criteria and exit gates for each contract milestone, in close collaboration with engineering and program leads.
• Participate in design reviews to catch defects before they reach hardware — shift-left quality is the cheapest quality.
• Build test frameworks and plans that scale — write once, run many, with procedures clear enough that any trained executor produces reliable results.
• Perform hands-on testing for high-risk or novel functionality where engineering judgment is the bar.

Requirements

• 4+ years in V&V, systems test, autonomy/AV test, or a closely related discipline.
• Demonstrated experience writing unambiguous test procedures — plans, acceptance criteria, and validation reports another engineer or technician can execute end-to-end without back-and-forth.
• Robotics or industrial systems domain knowledge — comfortable reasoning across mechanical, electrical, and software layers.
• Experience designing acceptance tests for hardware deliverables, including procedures handed to integration partners or customers for vehicle handoff.
• Strong structured thinking — you can decompose a fuzzy "the vehicle should work" requirement into a concrete pass/fail criterion.
• Test automation proficiency in any programming/scripting language, with comfort across Linux, and simulator-based test environments. ROS2 experience a strong plus.
• Track record of catching defects in design review, where they're cheapest to fix.

Qualifications

• 4+ years in V&V, systems test, autonomy/AV test, or a closely related discipline.
• Demonstrated experience writing unambiguous test procedures — plans, acceptance criteria, and validation reports another engineer or technician can execute end-to-end without back-and-forth.
• Robotics or industrial systems domain knowledge — comfortable reasoning across mechanical, electrical, and software layers.
• Experience designing acceptance tests for hardware deliverables, including procedures handed to integration partners or customers for vehicle handoff.
• Strong structured thinking — you can decompose a fuzzy "the vehicle should work" requirement into a concrete pass/fail criterion.
• Test automation proficiency in any programming/scripting language, with comfort across Linux, and simulator-based test environments. ROS2 experience a strong plus.
• Track record of catching defects in design review, where they're cheapest to fix.

Skills

• Strong structured thinking.
• Test automation proficiency in any programming/scripting language, with comfort across Linux, and simulator-based test environments. ROS2 experience a strong plus.

Benefits

• Mission that matters: The vehicles we automate operate in places no human should have to be — steel mills with molten slag, fertilizer plants thick with chemical dust, and similar environments. Removing people from such conditions is our mission.
• Collaborative environment: Work alongside a tight-knit group of ~25 people, each expert in their field, on collaborative projects.
• Hybrid workplace: Enjoy the flexibility of a hybrid work model, with engineering based in our SF Mission office three days a week, giving a good balance of maker time and synchronization time.
• Open source advocacy: We strongly support open-source robotics efforts, and your work will be shareable and publishable wherever possible.
• Real impact in your first 90 days: You'll define the acceptance test framework for our two largest active contracts, ship your first IATs to integrator partners, and set the bar for how every vehicle we deliver gets accepted.
• Humor & passion: We might occasionally be a bunch of rosbags, but our passion and humor drive us to accelerate the realization of autonomous industrial vehicles.

Pay

$150K - $200K

Schedule

Full-time