Principal Systems Engineer - Autonomy Behavior Validation (Autonomous Vehicles)

Location: Sunnyvale, California, United States

Salary: $238,700–$365,700 per year, plus bonus potential and benefits.

Company

hirify.global develops automotive products and autonomous driving technologies with a vision of zero crashes, zero emissions, and zero congestion.

What you will do

• Set the technical strategy and systems engineering approach for autonomous behavior validation across capabilities, programs, and releases.
• Define readiness criteria and connect safety claims, hazard analysis, requirements, and validation evidence to supervised release, driverless launch, and continuous release decisions.
• Diagnose complex behavioral issues across perception, prediction, planning, and controls using fleet and incident data, and lead efforts to close behavioral escapes and coverage gaps.
• Design validation strategies combining simulation, road data, closed-course testing, human references, and expert review while balancing coverage, confidence, fidelity, runtime, and cost.
• Guide validation tools, data pipelines, scorecards, and AI-assisted or agentic workflows toward repeatable, scalable products.
• Lead cross-functional technical reviews, mentor engineers, and advance systems engineering and validation practices across the autonomous vehicle organization.

Requirements

• Master’s degree in systems engineering, mechanical engineering, aerospace engineering, electrical engineering, computer science, robotics, or a related field, plus 10 or more years of professional experience in autonomous vehicles, robotics, simulation, systems engineering, or safety-critical validation.
• Proven experience evaluating autonomous vehicles for a self-driving fleet, launch, supervised release, or another high-consequence product decision, including owning or materially shaping a go/no-go recommendation.
• Deep end-to-end expertise in autonomous driving and how perception, prediction, planning, and controls produce on-road behavior across scenarios, road users, and operating conditions.
• Strong systems engineering fundamentals, including decomposition, ODD definition, requirements strategy, V&V planning, traceability, and large-scale simulation evaluation.
• Strong Python and agentic workflow experience, including production-quality analysis and validation software and rapid code-based engineering investigation.
• Demonstrated technical leadership across organizational boundaries, including setting direction beyond a single team and clearly explaining results, assumptions, and limitations to engineers and senior leaders.

Nice to have

• Technical leadership validating a driverless commercial launch or expansion into new operating domains.
• Experience evaluating learned or end-to-end driving systems, including behavior characterization, regression analysis, and generalization.
• Experience with human benchmarking, attentive-human benchmarks, counterfactual methods, or replay methods.
• Experience building or using a safety case and familiarity with STPA, FMEA, fault trees, ISO 21448 (SOTIF), UL 4600, or ISO 26262.
• Experience with risk quantification, risk acceptance, and translating legal or regulatory expectations into a defensible compliance strategy.
• Experience designing validation lifecycles, scorecards, confidence rubrics, or behavior protocols used by multiple engineering teams.

Culture & Benefits

• Full-time employment with health, dental, vision, HSA, FSA, retirement savings, life insurance, sickness and accident benefits, paid vacation and holidays.
• Additional benefits include tuition assistance, an employee assistance program, and GM vehicle discounts.
• Bonus potential is based on company performance, job level, and individual performance.
• Employment decisions follow applicable equal employment opportunity and non-discrimination requirements.
• Role-related assessments and/or pre-employment screening may be required where applicable.