Staff Systems Safety- Collision Avoidance

Job description

At Rhoda AI, we’re building the next generation of generalist intelligent robots. We own the full robotics stack from high-performance hardware and robot systems to the infrastructure and state-of-the-art foundation world models that control our robots. Our robots are designed to be generalists capable of operating in complex, real-world environments and handling long-tail edge cases, made possible by our cutting edge research and end-to-end system design. 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. We're looking for a technical executor with a bias for action, impeccable rigor, and the ability to drive cross-disciplinary teams. The candidate must demonstrate deep technical credibility and the appetite to grow into a leadership position as the safety organization scales. What You'll Do - 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 - Define safety requirements for object/human detection, tracking, intent prediction, and fallback behaviors under sensor degradation or occlusion - Develop Functional Safety Concepts, Functional Safety Requirements, and Technical Safety Requirements for Collision Avoidance features - Derive requirements for fail-safe and fail-operational behaviors, degraded states, minimal risk maneuvers and human-robot interactions - Develop test cases for verification and validation of Collision Avoidance - Define, engineer, deploy, and employ system safety verification and validation equipment at HIL, SIL, and system level - Support incident investigation, near-miss analysis, and closed-loop safety requirement updates as fleet data accumulates What We're Looking For - B.S. in Engineering with focus on optics, vision pipeline, and image processing - 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 in optics, machine vision, and computer vision, laser sensors, LiDAR, and time-of-flight and other cameras - Experience with safety analysis methods: STPA, FMEA, FTA - Comfortable with full stack - lens, sensor, ISP, compute processing, AI algorithms, behavior prediction and trajectory control - Evidence of hands-on engineering work — test benches, measurement, and root-cause analysis, not just documentation - Hands-on experience in verification and validation of safety requirements using HIL and SIL Nice To Have (But Not Required) - 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 - Certified Functional Safety Engineer in Machinery Safety or Automotive/Autonomous Driving - Experience defining and validating safety-rated sensor fusion or redundant perception architectures - 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 - Strong quantitative modeling skills (Python or MATLAB) for simulation, scenario analysis, and statistical validation of safety claims Why This Role - Define the safety foundation for a humanoid robot operating in real-world human environments — work that is technically deep, consequential, and genuinely unsolved at this scale - Report directly to the Head of Safety and Certification with a clear path to grow into a leadership role as the safety organization scales alongside the company - Work at the intersection of functional safety, AI-driven control, and novel electromechanical systems — a combination that doesn't exist anywhere else