Safety Lead (Autonomous Vehicles)

Location: Onsite five days a week at the Santa Clara, California office

Salary: $180,000–$260,000 per year

Company

hirify.global develops Level 4 autonomous transportation technology for short-haul, B2B middle-mile logistics, integrating proprietary software and hardware for driverless freight delivery.

What you will do

• Lead and grow a multidisciplinary systems and safety engineering team, including planning, resource allocation, performance management, and delivery.
• Own the safety architecture, risk management strategy, safety lifecycle, and end-to-end safety case for the autonomous vehicle platform.
• Define safety and verification approaches for AI and machine learning systems, including robustness metrics, dataset coverage, and edge-case validation.
• Establish system safety requirements, hazard mitigations, functional safety concepts, and fail-operational or degradation paths across hardware, compute, and software.
• Direct safety governance, incident response, release gates, operational metrics, and validation through hardware-in-the-loop, closed-course, and simulation testing.
• Represent safety engineering with regulators, auditors, customers, OEMs, and Tier 1 suppliers, including development interface agreements and joint safety frameworks.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Systems Engineering, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, or a related field.
• 10+ years of systems safety engineering experience in autonomous vehicles, automotive, aerospace, or another safety-critical domain.
• 4+ years of direct engineering management experience, including team leadership and budget or resource management.
• Demonstrated experience building, delivering, and defending safety cases for deployed autonomous or robotic systems.
• Deep expertise in ISO 26262, ISO 21448/SOTIF, UL 4600, ISO/PAS 8800, HARA, FMEA, FTA, and STPA.
• Experience working with automotive OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers, customers, regulators, and external stakeholders.

Nice to have

• Ph.D. in Systems Engineering, Computer Science, Robotics, or Machine Learning.
• Experience with joint-development automotive programs and multi-party supply chains.
• Expertise in DNN interpretability, dataset quality, and non-deterministic software verification.
• Experience with regulatory or certification bodies, Goal Structuring Notation, Jama, Polarion, or DOORS.

Culture & Benefits

• Collaborative, respectful, and agile working environment.
• Inclusive culture focused on diversity, growth, and equal opportunity.
• Opportunity to contribute to autonomous freight transportation and supply-chain sustainability.
• Work with multidisciplinary teams developing proprietary autonomous vehicle technology.