# Functional Safety Lead at Atoms

- Company: Atoms
- What the company does: Backed by Initial Capital.
- Company website: https://atoms.com
- Type: Startups
- Level: Senior
- Location: San Francisco, CA
- Work setup: On-site
- Pay: $182K to $238K base salary per year (USD)
- Posted: 2026-09-01
- Apply by: 2026-10-16
- Apply: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/atoms/jobs/8769623002
- Page: https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/atoms-functional-safety-lead/

## About the role

This role owns the functional safety analysis of our automated vehicle platform and its sensor suite: what can fail, how it manifests, what the system does about it, and whether that response is good enough. You will do the analysis yourself, and your assessment informs releases. It also owns something that often goes unowned — determining the safety impact of change. We move constantly, and someone has to be able to say quickly and credibly what a given change does to the safety argument. That is this role.

## What they're looking for

- 8+ years in functional safety for automotive, automated vehicles, aerospace, industrial automation, or another safety-critical hardware domain, with deep hands-on analysis experience rather than process oversight alone
- Demonstrated ownership of HARA, FMEA, and FTA on real systems that shipped. We will go deep on specific analyses you have authored
- Strong standards fluency: ISO 26262, ISO 21448 (SOTIF), and UL 4600 — with the judgment to apply them proportionately rather than performing compliance theater
- Experience making release-gating safety calls under time pressure with incomplete information, and the ability to explain both your framework and a time you got it wrong
- Real hardware and electrical depth: sensors, actuation interfaces, power and grounding, wiring, EMC, redundancy architecture. You are comfortable at the vehicle with a schematic and a scope
- Programming ability — Python or similar — sufficient to analyze field data, build your own tooling, and work fluently with an AI coding assistant

Tags: Transport - Engineering