Staff Functional Safety Engineer

Ford Ford · Auto · Palo Alto, CA +1 · PD Operations and Quality

Staff Functional Safety Engineer responsible for ensuring the safety of complex electronic control features in electric vehicles, leading the end-to-end safety lifecycle from concept to production, and ensuring compliance with ISO 26262. Requires deep analytical rigor, system-level thinking, and leadership to drive a robust safety culture.

What you'd actually do

  1. Lead and execute end-to-end functional safety analyses, including HARA, FMEA, and FTA, to identify potential hazards and quantitatively assess safety risks across the autonomous system.
  2. Define and manage the comprehensive set of functional safety requirements and safety concepts that govern system architecture and design choices.
  3. Lead the development and assessment of full safety cases for ASIL A- D products, managing the lifecycle from initial concept to production.
  4. Collaborate with system and hardware design engineers to develop and document hardware-level functional safety requirements and decompose module-level requirements into ECU-level requirements.
  5. Derive and verify technical safety concepts and hardware metrics, including PMHF (Probability Metric for Hardware Failure), SPFM, and LFM, to meet ISO 26262 Part 5 and Part 11 requirements.

Skills

Required

  • Minimum of 4+ years of functional safety engineering experience in safety-critical systems within the automotive, aerospace, or industrial sectors.
  • Deep expertise in the application and assessment of ISO 26262:2018 and familiarity with ISO 21448 (SOTIF).
  • Extensive experience leading and performing complex safety analyses (HARA, FMEA, FTA, DFA, STPA) for autonomous or highly complex E/E systems.
  • Strong understanding of failure mode analysis for complex electrical designs, ASICs, and advanced electrical circuits.
  • Demonstrated technical project management skills with the ability to manage multiple parallel, cross-functional safety-critical projects.
  • Deep understanding of embedded control system development, embedded software, and verification and validation (V&V) processes.
  • Background in data science and statistics with a focus on analyzing performance for quantitative risk reduction and safety assessment.
  • Proven leadership experience working with external partners, suppliers, and regulatory bodies or auditors.
  • Excellent communication skills with a track record of leading technical meetings with leadership teams and providing mentorship to engineering peers.

Nice to have

  • Bachelor's degree or higher in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Physical Sciences, or equivalent combination of relevant education and experience.

What the JD emphasized

  • ISO 26262
  • ISO 21448 (SOTIF)
  • HARA
  • FMEA
  • FTA
  • DFA
  • STPA
  • ASIL A- D
  • PMHF
  • SPFM
  • LFM