Functional Safety Lead

Who we are

Atoms is building the machines that power the next era of progress.

Over the last decade, software has transformed the digital world. But the physical world, where food is made, minerals are mined, goods are moved, and industries are run, remains far less intelligent, far less efficient, and far more constrained. We’re changing that.

Atoms builds Physical AI - real-world robots for the industries that move civilization forward, starting with food, mining, and transport. Our systems are designed to understand, predict, and control the real world with precision, turning complex physical operations into something more reliable, more scalable, and more productive.

This work requires more than robotics. It requires deep integration across hardware, software, AI, operations, manufacturing, and real estate. We don’t just build machines in a lab. We deploy them into real environments, operate them, learn from them, and improve them until they work at scale.

We are roboticists, engineers, operators, and builders. We believe the next great technology companies will not only transform information, but the physical systems that shape everyday life.

If you want to work on hard problems with real-world impact, join us.

This role owns the technical safety analysis of our automated vehicle platform and sensor suite. You will lead the fault and failure analysis of the platform and its sensing chain - what can fail, how those failures manifest, how the system behaves when they occur, and whether that behavior is satisfactory.

You will also determine the safety impact of change. Hardware revisions, sensor changes, mounting and calibration updates, software releases, new platform variants, and expansions of the operating domain all move the safety argument.

This is a technical individual contributor role with real impact. You will lead the analysis and documentation, and your assessment carries weight in development decisions.

• Hazard analysis and safety requirements. Own HARA for the platform, derive safety goals and requirements, and drive them into the architecture. Maintain traceability from hazard to requirement to verification evidence.
• Fault and failure analysis. Lead FMEA across the platform - actuation interfaces, redundancy, and fallback paths - and across the sensor suite: sensor faults, degraded and partially obscured modes, and the failure modes that are silent rather than loud.
• Sensor suite safety. Own the analysis of sensing sufficiency and degradation: what coverage exists, how it erodes under adverse conditions, which combinations of sensor loss are tolerable, how faults are detected and how quickly, and what the system does about them.
• Change impact analysis. Own the process and the judgment. Define what triggers a safety assessment, what depth each class of change warrants, what evidence is needed to clear it, and what gets escalated. Make the assessment fast enough that engineering routes changes through it rather than around it.
• Safety case and standards. Build and maintain the safety argument for the platform, structured against ISO 26262, ISO 21448 (SOTIF), and UL 4600 as appropriate. Work with the safety case leads on the interpretation of where these standards apply and why.
• Verification strategy. Define what evidence closes each safety claim: fault injection, HIL and vehicle-level testing, field data, or analysis. Partner with engineering to build the fault injection and degraded-mode test capability required.
• Interface with operations. Work with safety operations so that field events, disengagements, and investigation findings flow into hazard analysis, and so that identified hazards produce operational controls where engineering controls are not yet available.

We expect this role to be materially more productive than the same role was three years ago, and we expect AI tooling to be the reason. We are adopting AI systems purpose-built to accelerate safety analysis - hazard identification, failure mode generation, traceability, and documentation - and this role is expected to put them to work and shape what they become.

Concretely, we want…