Senior Safety Systems Engineer

About us

AIM builds autonomy for the real world - robots that move mountains. Our systems fuse hardware, robotics, autonomy, and mission-critical software into ruggedized, safety-critical machinery that operates on job sites across the world. We are replacing decades of manual, error-prone, high-risk work with intelligent, automated machines that transform how earthmoving is done.

You'll drive programs that bring autonomy from development into the physical world. AIM machines operate across challenging real-world environments - varying terrain, climates, materials, and operating conditions. TPMs at AIM orchestrate the engineering, hardware, and field efforts required to ensure our autonomy stack performs consistently and safely across these real operational domains.

We're growing fast, scaling globally, and building the operational backbone that will define the next century of construction.

About you

You're driven to build systems that work - robust, failure-tolerant, deeply engineered systems that integrate sensors, compute, networking, software, and safety mechanisms into a coherent whole. You understand that autonomy isn't just perception or control; it's an end-to-end architecture problem where a flaw in any layer - mechanical, electrical, software, or operational - can compromise safety or reliability.

You love diving deep into system design, architecture decisions, failure modes, interface contracts, and safety mechanisms such as emergency stops, degraded-mode operation, and functional safety pathways. You can break down ambiguous requirements into actionable specifications, and you can connect high-level product goals to the underlying engineering decisions that make them possible.

You thrive in cross-functional environments - sitting with robotics engineers to discuss control latency, with electrical engineers to evaluate sensor wiring integrity, with field operators to understand environmental constraints, and with our TPMs and TLs to ensure safety and system integrity are baked into program plans.

You are comfortable assessing risk, probing assumptions, driving clarity, harmonizing technical viewpoints, and pushing teams toward the right architectural decisions - balancing performance, reliability, safety, and speed.

About us together

We are bringing autonomy to heavy equipment at scale. That means building systems that work the first time, every time, under the harshest conditions - with no tolerance for ambiguity in safety, reliability, or operational performance.

Together, we will take on difficult engineering challenges:

  • Ensuring safety systems behave deterministically under every failure mode
  • Integrating heterogeneous sensors and networks into unified, predictable data flows
  • Validating systems against extreme environmental and mechanical conditions
  • Building observability mechanisms that give us deep insight into field performance
  • Designing architectures that scale across multiple machine types and deployments

We will debate, iterate, refine, and converge - always grounded in data, safety, and customer requirements. If you thrive in that kind of engineering environment, you'll be at home here.

What you will own

  • Safety Systems Engineering & Leadership
    • Own the architecture, design, and validation of safety-critical systems including fail-safe emergency stops, safety relays, safety controllers, watchdog mechanisms, and machine-state enforcement.
    • Lead comprehensive hazard analyses (FMEA, HAZOP, FTA), identifying failure modes across mechanical, electrical, control, and software boundaries - and ensuring mitigation strategies are designed and validated.
    • Ensure rigorous traceability from hazards to requirements to design to validation to field behavior, enabling audit readiness and compliance.
    • Define and refine Concepts of Operations (ConOps) for safe machine use across diverse operating environments, customer workflows, and machine capabilities.
    • Develop safety training and system understanding for internal teams, field operators, and customers.

  • Systems Architecture & Requirements Leadership
    • Translate broad product goals into detailed system-level requirements across sensing, compute, networking, control, telemetry, autonomy subsystems, and safety pathways.
    • Define system architecture for multi-domain integration - embedded systems, hydraulics, perception pipelines, operator interfaces, and cloud components.
    • Drive architectural clarity across teams and ensure design principles (serviceability, reliability, manufacturability, testability) are upheld.
    • Identify cross-domain dependencies and risks early; influence design decisions to maximize safety margins and mitigate architectural pitfalls.
    • Build scalable requirements frameworks that support multiple machine types, configurations, and generational evolution.

  • System Observability & Performance Insights
    • Architect observability infrastructure that provides deep visibility into system health - safety system status, sensor health, compute performance, networking reliability, machine performance, uptime, and availability.
    • Define monitoring requirements and data flows for real-time diagnostics, predictive maintenance, and fleet-wide performance analytics.
    • Collaborate with autonomy, cloud, and software engineering to ensure system data informs operational excellence and continuous improvement.

  • Verification, Validation & Field Readiness
    • Own end-to-end verification and validation of complex systems - environmental testing, networking performance, shock/vibration tolerance, compute performance, and safety response times.
    • Build and maintain comprehensive test plans, including automated test suites for safety-critical components and continuous regression coverage.
    • Validate system behavior under extreme physical, environmental, and operational conditions - ensuring field readiness long before customer deployment.
    • Maintain complete validation documentation to support regulatory compliance, partner integration, and customer trust.

Basic Qualifications

  • Bachelor's degree in Systems Engineering, Mechanical/Electrical Engineering, Robotics, or a related technical field.
  • 7+ years of systems engineering experience, including responsibility for safety-critical or mission-critical systems.
  • Proven experience with hazard analysis methodologies (FMEA, FTA, HAZOP) and safety-critical decision pathways.
  • Strong background in hardware/software integration, systems architecture, and multi-domain engineering trade-offs.
  • Experience defining system-level requirements and driving alignment across hardware, firmware, autonomy, and software teams.
  • Experience with verification & validation of complex systems - environmental, mechanical, networking, or compute.
  • Strong communication skills - able to influence engineers, TPMs, TLs, managers, and external partners.
  • Demonstrated ability to drive cross-functional initiatives, resolve ambiguity, and deliver systems that work in real-world conditions.

Preferred Qualifications

  • Master's degree in Systems Engineering or related field.
  • Professional certifications (CSEP, INCOSE) or functional safety certifications.
  • Experience with autonomous systems, robotics, or heavy industrial equipment.
  • Knowledge of functional safety standards (ISO 13849, IEC 61508, ISO 26262, or analogous frameworks).
  • Experience designing or validating emergency stop systems, safety relays, or fail-safe control pathways.
  • Experience with test automation frameworks or hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testing.
  • Background in manufacturing, industrial control, or real-world fielded systems.
  • Program management experience or partnership with TPMs and TLs.

How you'll stand out

  • You bring holistic systems thinking - architecture, requirements, safety, and field reality - into every decision.
  • You influence design across hardware, autonomy, firmware, and software through deep technical judgment and clarity of reasoning.
  • You understand that safety is not a feature - it is an architecture.
  • You enjoy diving deep into complex, multi-domain systems while stepping back to define long-term architectural direction.
  • You bring order to ambiguity, rigor to safety decisions, and clarity to engineering teams moving fast under field pressure.

What we offer

  • The opportunity to define the safety and systems architecture for a first-of-its-kind autonomous platform.
  • A high-impact role with visibility across engineering, product, OEM partners, and global deployments.
  • Significant autonomy, ownership, and influence over the future of AIM's system-level engineering.
  • Competitive compensation, equity, full benefits, and global travel opportunities to deployment sites.
  • The chance to build systems that directly transform how the world builds.