Safety Engineer — Autonomous Machinery II - III

Safety Engineer - Autonomous Machinery II - III (Contract)

Logan, UT, United States (On-site)

Contract (9 months 2 days)

Published 2 days ago

Verification & Validation

OSHA regulations

regulatory compliance

Documentation & Auditing

Regulatory & Safety Compliance

We are seeking a Safety Engineer to ensure our autonomous machines are safe both as designed and as deployed. This role will combine safety analysis and oversight of engineering designs for autonomous heavy machinery and vehicles; as well as site assessment and safety design for prospective worksites where autonomy will be deployed.

The Safety Engineer reports to the Blitz Chief to support both Blitz and Business Development activities.

The Blitz Team is client's rapid-execution engineering group, focused on quickly turning new concepts into working autonomous systems.

As a cross-functional team spanning software, electrical, mechanical, systems, and field operations, Blitz accelerates product development, validates new ideas, and helps launch customer pilot programs on real equipment in real operating environments. Team members thrive in a fast-paced setting where adaptability, hands-on problem solving, and a willingness to tackle whatever is needed are key to success.

Review mechanical, electrical, control, and software designs for safety, and lead design safety reviews.

Conduct and maintain hazard and risk analyses - HARA, STPA, FMEA, and FTA - on machine systems and control architectures.

Derive safety requirements from those analyses and work with engineering to write them so they are traceable and verifiable.

Determine the performance level or safety integrity each safety function must achieve, and confirm the implemented design meets it.

Develop verification and test plans for safety functions, define acceptance criteria, and review the resulting evidence.

Maintain the safety documentation set - analyses, requirements, safety cases, and verification records - and support internal and external safety audits.

Support engineers in owning the safety of their own designs.

Travel to customer sites early in a project to assess the operating environment: traffic and machine-personnel interaction, terrain, sight lines, adjacent manned equipment, infrastructure, and existing site procedures.

Produce a written site assessment stating what the site requires before autonomous operation can begin safely, including any conditions that make it inadvisable.

Author the site safety plan: operating area boundaries, machine interaction and exclusion zones, emergency stop architecture and coverage, perimeter and access control, signage, communications, and maintenance isolation.

Specify the required protective measures - guarding, interlocks, emergency stop hardware, presence sensing, warning devices, access control - see them installed, and verify them on site by test.

Define the safe operating envelope for each machine and site, and issue or recommend the determination permitting autonomous operation.

Document the customers safety responsibilities and train their operators, maintenance staff, supervisors, and safety personnel against them.

Serve as the safety contact for customer operations and safety leadership, and advise commercial and project teams on safety constraints early enough to shape project scope.

Essential education, work experience & skills:

Bachelor's degree in engineering, occupational safety, or a related technical field. Equivalent hands‑on experience - including trade, military, or field experience - will be considered in lieu of a degree.

Three or more years of engineering work in which the safety of machines or powered equipment was a significant responsibility, in working industrial environments such as mines and quarries, manufacturing or food processing plants, distribution yards, construction sites, or farms. Five or more years preferred.

A dedicated safety title is not required. Candidates from plant maintenance or controls engineering, industrial or manufacturing engineering, machine building and integration, or mine safety are welcome, provided the work has included assessing and mitigating real hazards around powered equipment. Depth in one half of this role with aptitude for the other will be considered.

A record of personally identifying hazards on real equipment or real sites and carrying the resulting protective measures through specification, installation, and verification. This experience is accepted in lieu of formal safety certification or familiarity with any…