Rhoda AI

Rhoda AI

Staff Systems Safety- Collision Avoidance

Mountain View · Staff+

Sponsorship not specifiedDetected 5 days ago
TypeScriptPythonMATLABFull-Stack DevelopmentAlgorithmsComputer VisionRoboticsHardware DesignSensorsResearchLeadership

About the role

  • We've raised over $450M and are investing aggressively in model research, infrastructure, hardware development, and manufacturing scale-up to make generalist robotics a reality.
  • This is a Staff position reporting directly to the Head of Safety and Certification.
  • The candidate must demonstrate deep technical credibility and the appetite to grow into a leadership position as the safety organization scales.

Responsibilities

  • Own the collision avoidance safety case for humanoid robot platforms, from hazard identification through validation and field monitoring
  • Lead our humanoids' Hazard Analysis and Risk Assessment, System-Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA), FMEA, and fault tree analysis for perception, planning, and actuation subsystems involved in collision detection and avoidance
  • Define and validate minimum safety distances, detection zones, and timing/spatial/force constraints for dynamic human-robot shared spaces, drawing on established frameworks (e.g., ISO 13855-style detection and approach speed logic) and adapting them where humanoid mobility and manipulation introduce new hazard geometries
  • Apply SOTIF (ISO 21448) methodology to identify and reduce risk from perception limitations, edge cases, and unknown-unsafe scenarios - not just component failures - and build this into a continuous scenario discovery and triage process
  • Develop Functional Safety Concepts, Functional Safety Requirements, and Technical Safety Requirements for Collision Avoidance features
  • Develop test cases for verification and validation of Collision Avoidance
  • Support incident investigation, near-miss analysis, and closed-loop safety requirement updates as fleet data accumulates

Requirements

  • 5+ years in safety engineering for robotics, autonomous vehicles, or other safety-critical human-interactive systems.
  • Working knowledge of functional safety standards and how to adapt them to novel domains (e.g., ISO 26262, ISO 13849, ISO 10218, ISO/TS 15066, IEC 61508, UL 4600)
  • Experience designing safety systems for complex electromechanical products with significant safety aspects
  • Experience with safety analysis methods: STPA, FMEA, FTA
  • Hands-on experience in verification and validation of safety requirements using HIL and SIL
  • Experience in humanoid robots, automotive, or autonomous mobile robots (AMR)
  • Experience in an autonomous driving engineering program, with hands-on ownership of SOTIF (ISO 21448) processes - scenario-based risk assessment, triggering condition analysis, and unknown-unsafe scenario reduction
  • Experience defining and validating safety-rated sensor fusion or redundant perception architectures

Nice to have

  • Nice To Have (But Not Required)

Benefits

  • Exposure to simulation-based scenario generation and coverage argument tooling (e.g., scenario mining, adversarial scenario generation) from AV SOTIF work, applicable to humanoid edge-case discovery
  • In-depth understanding of safety-critical architectures for vision pipeline, compute, networking, and power distribution
  • B.S. in Engineering with focus on optics, vision pipeline, and image processing

Company info

  • What We're Looking For

This listing is sourced directly from Rhoda AI's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.