Senior Functional Safety Engineer (Hardware)

Bedrock Robotics · San Francisco

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Join the team bringing autonomy to the built world

At Bedrock, we're moving AI out of the lab and onto real job sites. Our team includes veterans who helped launch Waymo, scaled Segment to a $3.2B acquisition, and grew Uber Freight to $5B in revenue. We retrofit the heavy equipment contractors already own, starting with excavators, so experienced crews can safely take on more projects and deliver more of the critical infrastructure our society needs.

In August 2026, Bedrock-equipped excavators began doing fully autonomous, paid work on live commercial job sites. We've more than doubled our customer base since 2025, and our machines now work with contractors across the South, Midwest, and Mid-Atlantic

In October 2026, we raised a $600M Series C co-led by CapitalG and Emergence Capital, bringing our total funding to nearly $1B. We're using it to put more autonomous machines to work, build the field and operations teams behind every deployment, and expand into new machine types and job-site tasks.

This is where algorithms meet steel-toed boots. You'll work alongside construction veterans and world-class engineers to solve physical-world problems that simulations can't touch. If you're ready to do meaningful work on hard problems, we'd love to have you join us.

We’re growing our sizable fleet of retrofitted autonomous construction machines, and we’re looking for a talented functional safety engineer to help define the functional and technical safety concept across the system, with a focus on hardware. You will work alongside the safety, hardware and software teams to conduct safety analysis, develop diagnostics, generate fault metrics, and guide key system elements through the end-to-end safety lifecycle.

Key Qualifications

• Direct experience in delivering functional safety work products according to ISO 13849, ISO 26262, IEC 61508 or similar

• Strong foundational knowledge in safety engineering techniques such as HARA, FMEA, FMEDA, FTA, and STPA

• Experience defining and executing verification & validation in a safety context, including fault injection and HIL testing

• Familiarity with design and implementation of safety mechanisms and fault handling measures, such as TMR, watchdogs, redundancy management, and graceful degradation

Description and Responsibilities

• Help define the functional safety concept for the system

• Author technical safety concepts at the HW level

• Partner with HW team to understand architectural requirements for future HW platforms

• Author HW safety requirements and drive design of safety mechanisms

• Establish test plans for verification and validation of the safety requirements

• Define test infrastructure and automation to support timely program execution

• Execute safety analysis such as HARA, FMEA, FMEDA, and FTA

Background

• BS or advanced degree in electrical, mechanical, systems, or a related engineering field, or equivalent practical experience.

• 7+ years in safety-critical hardware or systems engineering, including several focused specifically on functional safety.

• Hands-on hardware background: you have designed, reviewed, brought up, debugged, or qualified electrical and electronic hardware yourself, not only assessed it from documents.

• Working knowledge of functional safety standards ISO 13849, IEC 61508, IEC 62061, ISO 26262, ISO 25119, or ISO 19014 and how they apply to different systems and applications.

• Strong experience with safety analysis

• Comfort with real-time and embedded systems, fail-safe and fail-operational architectures, and the failure modes of sensing and compute hardware.

• Comfort working directly with hardware and test infrastructure to execute and debug safety features and tests

Ways to stand out

• Experience with autonomous systems

• Experience with system-level functional safety

• Hands-on certification or third-party assessment work (TÜV, UL, etc.)

• Experience standing up fault injection / HIL benches

• Background in sensing and compute: cameras, lidar, GNSS, IMUs

• Familiarity with heavy construction machines such as excavators, articulated dump trucks, dozers, wheel loaders, or motor graders.

How we work

We are a startup, so we look for engineers with an appetite for agility. We do not compromise on safety and we still find ways to move extremely fast. In practice that means we would rather have a sharp, quantified argument about one real hazard than an exhaustive document nobody reads.

Bedrock Robotics is an Equal Opportunity Employer

We’re committed to building a diverse and inclusive workplace. We consider all qualified applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, ancestry, age, disability, veteran status, genetic information, or any other protected characteristic.

Reasonable Accommodations

We want our hiring process to be accessible to everyone. If you need an accommodation to participate in the application or interview process, please let your recruiter know so we can support you.

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