Senior Systems & Safety Engineer – Autonomy
About this role
Engineers who thrive on rigorous safety analysis and complex autonomous system architectures will find a strong alignment with Gatik. The team builds Level 4 autonomous technology for commercial middle-mile logistics, creating reliable transportation systems for major retailers like Walmart. Daily work involves owning the functional safety lifecycle across software modules, designing fail-operational mechanisms, and validating release readiness against strict safety standards.
The role exists to ensure uncompromising system safety across the entire autonomous driving stack as the commercial fleet expands across North America. Candidates who succeed here bring deep expertise in functional safety standards, a methodical approach to hazard analysis, and the ability to bridge the gap between theoretical safety concepts and practical software deployment.
What you will do
- Define and maintain the Functional Safety Concept and Technical Safety Concept for Level 4 autonomous systems following ISO 26262 up to ASIL D.
- Lead system-level hazard analysis and risk assessments, system-theoretic process analyses, failure mode and effects analyses, and fault tree analyses across autonomy modules.
- Derive safety requirements from vehicle-level goals down to software components and allocate them to middleware, stack algorithms, and diagnostic monitors.
- Architect fail-operational, fail-aware, and fail-safe fallback strategies including degraded modes, trajectory fallback, and pull-over behaviors.
- Define and monitor safety performance indicators and metrics to continuously assess stack maturity and release readiness.
- Partner closely with autonomy software, middleware, infrastructure, and systems teams to embed functional safety into daily agile development processes.
What you need
- Hold a Bachelor of Science, Master of Science, or Doctor of Philosophy in Robotics, Systems Engineering, Computer Science, or Aerospace Engineering.
- Bring at least 6 years of experience in functional safety or systems engineering for autonomous vehicles, robotics, or safety-critical aerospace and automotive platforms.
- Demonstrate deep expertise in ISO 26262, UL 4600, and ISO 21448 standards.
- Possess mastery of safety analysis techniques including HARA, STPA, FMEA, FTA, and Reliability Block Diagrams.
- Show strong programming proficiency in C and Python for reading codebases, analyzing logs, and writing architectural scripts.
- Have experience defining architecture for deterministic, real-time autonomous systems.
- Demonstrate experience with safety and requirements management software such as Jama, DOORS, Enterprise Architect, or code-based tracing tools.
Nice to have
- Experience shipping Level 4 driverless commercial operations in trucking or passenger autonomous vehicles
- Experience with middleware safety including ROS2 safety layers, Adaptive AUTOSAR, or custom IPC frameworks
- Expertise in safety arguments using Goal Structuring Notation
Skills and tech stack
Questions candidates ask
What is the work location and remote policy for this role?
This role is onsite 5 days a week at the Santa Clara, California office.
What is the salary range for this position?
The salary range for this position is $160,000 to $240,000.
What safety standards and analysis techniques will I be working with?
You will work with ISO 26262 up to ASIL D, UL 4600, and ISO 21448 standards, utilizing safety analysis techniques such as HARA, STPA, FMEA, and FTA.