UIUC Research Park Intern - Functional Safety Hardware

About Rivian

Rivian is on a mission to keep the world adventurous forever. This goes for the emissions-free Electric Adventure Vehicles we build, and the curious, courageous souls we seek to attract.

As a company, we constantly challenge what’s possible, never simply accepting what has always been done. We reframe old problems, seek new solutions and operate comfortably in areas that are unknown. Our backgrounds are diverse, but our team shares a love of the outdoors and a desire to protect it for future generations.

Internship Term:
Summer 2026

Rivian internships are experiences optimized for student candidates. To be eligible, you must be an undergraduate or graduate student in an accredited program during the internship term with an expected graduation date between December 2028 through May 2028. Rivian's Internship Program requires active student enrollment. Information regarding your expected degree completion date is collected solely to verify eligibility and determine your availability for future full-time opportunities.

Rivian is an equal opportunity employer and does not use graduation dates to determine the age of applicants or as a basis for discriminatory hiring decisions.

If you are not pursuing a degree, please see our full-time positions on our Rivian careers site.

Note that if your university has specific requirements for internship programs, it is your responsibility to fulfill those requirements.

We are looking for a detail-oriented Hardware Functional Safety Engineer to join our engineering team. In this role, you will be at the front lines of ensuring our next-generation safety-critical systems—specifically High-Performance SoCs and complex PCBs—are robust enough to handle the rigors of real-world deployment. You will focus on identifying potential failure points through rigorous systematic analysis, ensuring that our hardware designs are resilient against both random hardware failures and common-cause dependencies.

• Your primary focus will be supporting the functional safety lifecycle for hardware components through quantitative and qualitative analysis.
• FTA (Fault Tree Analysis):
  Support top-down FTA to identify combinations of hardware failures that could lead to a violation of safety goals. You will help build logic trees to visualize and quantify the probability of catastrophic system failures.
• DFA (Dependent Failure Analysis):
  Conduct DFA to identify potential "freedom from interference" issues. You will analyze shared resources (e.g., clock trees, power rails, or physical proximity on a PCB) to identify cascading failures and common-cause failures (CCF) that could bypass safety redundancies.
• FMEDA (Failure Modes, Effects, and Diagnostic Analysis):
  Assist in performing quantitative FMEDA to calculate hardware architectural metrics (SPFM, LFM) and the Probabilistic Metric for random Hardware Failures (PMHF). You will evaluate the effectiveness of safety mechanisms in detecting or controlling hardware faults.
• Design Review:
  Review hardware requirements and schematics to ensure safety mechanisms (e.g., ECC, parity, redundant paths, voltage monitors) are correctly implemented to mitigate the faults identified in your FTA and DFA.
• Documentation:
  Contribute to the creation of work products required by ISO 26262, such as the Hardware Safety Analysis Report and Safety Case fragments.

• Must be currently pursuing a bachelor's, master's, or PhD degree at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
• Actively pursuing a degree or one closely related in Electrical Engineering or Computer Engineering.
• Foundational knowledge of ISO 26262 (specifically Parts 5, 9, and 11).
• Understanding of FTA (qualitative/quantitative) and the principles of DFA.
• Ability to read and interpret PCB schematics and understand SoC internal blocks (CPUs, interconnects, memory).
• A "safety-first" mindset, extreme attention to detail, and the ability to explain complex failure modes to design engineers.
• Experience with safety analysis tools (e.g., Ansys Medini Analyze, Item Toolkit, or Reliability Workbench), preferred.
• Knowledge of ASIL (Automotive Safety Integrity Level) decomposition…