Safety Case Engineer

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.

What you’ll do

• Own a defined scope of the safety case end to end, from first draft to signed, including its upkeep afterward when something it depends on is revised. Author of record means the argument is yours to defend.
• Define what your argument covers and what it explicitly does not: the conditions it assumes, the exclusions and why they hold, and the hazards that cannot arise within the scope.
• Judge evidence sufficiency: how much operating experience there is and how it was counted, coverage against each case, and where the evidence came from. Working closely with the functional safety, scenario validation and fleet operations leads to obtaining the evidence.
• Write the claim-argument-evidence map. So it's clear when it holds and when it doesn't.
• Convene review when the work is ready and not before, carry reviewer comments to documented resolution, and serve as independent reviewer on scopes you do not own.
• Be a demanding customer of the shared method and tooling built by the functional safety, scenario validation and fleet operations leads. When a rule is missing or ambiguous, or a tool makes the wrong thing easy, say so loudly — a local workaround does not stay local.
• Use AI tooling as part of the work: drafting from a template, generating and stress-testing candidate hazard sets, cross-checking coverage against the scenario library, tracing hazard to test to evidence, and finding where an upstream revision has invalidated something already written.

What we’re looking for

• 7+ years across functional safety, autonomy behaviour and fleet operations, with real hands-on depth in at least two and working fluency in the third. We will test all three; specialists in one who intend to learn the rest on the job are not a fit for these seats.
• You have authored a structured safety argument, not reviewed one — GSN or an equivalent claim-argument-evidence structure, on a real system, defended to someone who pushed back hard. Be ready to walk through one you wrote and the parts you would now write differently.
• Demonstrated hazard analysis ownership (HARA, FMEA, FTA or equivalent) and demonstrated scenario-based validation ownership. The combination is the requirement, not either half.
• Rigour about provenance. You instinctively distinguish a measurement from an estimate from a placeholder, and label them as such rather than letting a number acquire authority by being written down.
• The willingness to speak up. Some of this will be commercially inconvenient to leave unsigned, and we need people who can say an argument is not ready, say exactly what would make it ready, and what are the consequences not.
• Standards fluency across ISO 26262, ISO 21448 (SOTIF), UL 4600, and SAE J3016, with the judgment to apply them proportionately to a scoped argument rather than reproducing a full-program process at small scale.
• Comfort with the statistics of exposure, rare events and coverage, and with surrogate safety measures and their limits. A kinematic proximity metric measures proximity dynamics and not harm, and should never carry a claim alone.
• Programming ability in Python or similar, sufficient to work with fleet data, build your own tooling and work fluently with an AI coding assistant — with the boundary held firmly: a generated hazard list is a hypothesis to verify, and a generated argument map is a draft, never a signed argument.
• Exceptional written precision. More than any other role on this team the deliverable is a document that has to stand up without you in the room; vague writing here is not a style problem, it is a safety problem.
• The disposition three interchangeable seats need: focused enough to go deep on what you own, flexible enough to pick up a colleague's, and generous enough to make peer review genuinely useful rather than ceremonial.

Why join us

At Atoms, you’ll work on one of the defining challenges of our time—bringing automation into the physical world to drive real, lasting impact. We exist to uncover valuable unknown truths and turn them into progress, which means constantly pushing beyond what’s known and building what doesn’t yet exist. The work is ambitious and often challenging, but it’s grounded in a shared sense of purpose and a team committed to seeing it through together. Our work only matters if it serves others, and we know that meaningful progress depends on the trust of the people we serve and the strength of our team—so we invest in both, creating an environment where you can do your best work and grow.

What else you need to know

This role is based in our San Francisco office. Atoms is a company driven by invention and continuous change - we are constantly reimagining our industries, building new products, and refining how we operate. We do our best work together. That’s why all of our office-based teams work onsite, five days a week.

The base salary range for this role is $149,000 - $188,000 per year.

Actual compensation will be determined on an individual basis and may vary depending on experience, skills, and qualifications.

Base salary is just one part of your total rewards package. You may also be eligible for equity awards.

Benefits Summary (USA Full-Time Exempt Employees):

• Medical, Dental, Vision, Disability, and Life Insurance
• Flexible Spending Account / Health Savings Account Options
• 401(k)
• Equity
• Sick Time, Unlimited Flexible Time Off, and Paid Holidays
• Paid Parental Leave 
• Pre-Tax Commuter Benefit Plan
• Team lunch in our SoMa office every Tuesday and Thursday

Benefits are subject to change at the company's discretion.
Atoms accepts applications on an ongoing basis.

Ready to join us as we serve those who serve others? 

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