Staff System Safety Engineer

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 $400M 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 - Perform Hazard Analysis and Risk Assessment of humanoid robots across specific customer applications - Develop Functional Safety Concepts, Functional Safety Requirements, and Technical Safety Requirements - Perform system-level analyses to derive requirements related to stopping distances, perception, and timing/spatial/force constraints - Derive requirements for fail-safe and fail-operational behaviors, degraded states, and human-robot interactions - Develop test cases for verification and validation - Define, engineer, deploy, and employ system safety validation equipment at HIL, SIL, and system level What We're Looking For - B.S. in Electrical Engineering - Certified Functional Safety Engineer in IEC 61508 or ISO 26262 - Experience designing safety systems for complex electromechanical products with significant safety aspects - Experience in optics, machine vision, and computer vision - 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) - Certified Functional Safety Engineer in Machinery Safety - Experience designing and deploying industrial automation and safety systems - Certified SOTIF ISO 21448 engineer - Experience in automotive ADAS collision avoidance - Experience with laser sensors, LiDAR, and time-of-flight cameras - Hands-on experience performing FMEDA per IEC 61508 or ISO 26262 - In-depth understanding of safety-critical architectures for compute, networking, and power distribution 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 els