Duration :

6 +

Months Role Overview:

We are seeking a Safety Engineer to ensure our autonomous machines are safe both as designed and as deployed. This role will combine safety analysis and oversight of engineering designs for autonomous heavy machinery and vehicles; as well as site assessment and safety design for prospective worksites where autonomy will be deployed. The Safety Engineer reports to the Blitz Chief to support both Blitz and Business Development activities. The Blitz Team is client's rapid-execution engineering group, focused on quickly turning new concepts into working autonomous systems. As a cross-functional team spanning software, electrical, mechanical, systems, and field operations, Blitz accelerates product development, validates new ideas, and helps launch customer pilot programs on real equipment in real operating environments. Team members thrive in a fast-paced setting where adaptability, hands-on problem solving, and a willingness to tackle whatever is needed are key to success. Essential Duties And Responsibilities Engineering design safety Review mechanical, electrical, control, and software designs for safety, and lead design safety reviews. Conduct and maintain hazard and risk analyses — HARA, STPA, FMEA, and FTA — on machine systems and control architectures. Derive safety requirements from those analyses and work with engineering to write them so they are traceable and verifiable. Determine the performance level or safety integrity each safety function must achieve, and confirm the implemented design meets it. Develop verification and test plans for safety functions, define acceptance criteria, and review the resulting evidence. Maintain the safety documentation set — analyses, requirements, safety cases, and verification records — and support internal and external safety audits. Support engineers in owning the safety of their own designs. Customer site safety Travel to customer sites early in a project to assess the operating environment: traffic and machine-personnel interaction, terrain, sight lines, adjacent manned equipment, infrastructure, and existing site procedures. Produce a written site assessment stating what the site requires before autonomous operation can begin safely, including any conditions that make it inadvisable.

Author the site safety plan:

operating area boundaries, machine interaction and exclusion zones, emergency stop architecture and coverage, perimeter and access control, signage, communications, and maintenance isolation. Specify the required protective measures — guarding, interlocks, emergency stop hardware, presence sensing, warning devices, access control — see them installed, and verify them on site by test. Define the safe operating envelope for each machine and site, and issue or recommend the determination permitting autonomous operation. Document the customer's safety responsibilities and train their operators, maintenance staff, supervisors, and safety personnel against them. Serve as the safety contact for customer operations and safety leadership, and advise commercial and project teams on safety constraints early enough to shape project scope. Carry recurring site hazards back into design requirements. Essential Education, Work Experience, Job Skills Bachelor's degree in engineering, occupational safety, or a related technical field. Equivalent hands-on experience — including trade, military, or field experience — will be considered in lieu of a degree. Three or more years of engineering work in which the safety of machines or powered equipment was a significant responsibility, in working industrial environments such as mines and quarries, manufacturing or food processing plants, distribution yards, construction sites, or farms. Five or more years preferred. A dedicated safety title is not required. Candidates from plant maintenance or controls engineering, industrial or manufacturing engineering, machine building and integration, or mine safety are welcome, provided the work has included assessing and mitigating real hazards around powered equipment. Depth in one half of this role with aptitude for the other will be considered. A record of personally identifying hazards on real equipment or real sites and carrying the resulting protective measures through specification, installation, and verification. This experience is accepted in lieu of formal safety certification or familiarity with any particular published standard. Able to perform a machinery risk assessment — identify the hazards, judge severity, how often people are exposed, and how avoidable the hazard is, and determine how much risk reduction each hazard demands — and to work the hierarchy of risk reduction in order: eliminate the hazard by design where possible, then guard and safeguard, then warn and train for what remains. Able to select and design protective measures — guards, interlocks, presence sensing, emergency stop and all-stop circuits, access control, warning devices — to judge how reliable each safety function must be for the risk it addresses, and to verify by functional test that it performs as intended. Able to write safety requirements that follow from a hazard analysis and can be tested, and to define the test plans that demonstrate they are met. Able to assess a working site for the hazards created by mobile equipment and by people and machines sharing space — traffic and interaction, sight lines, terrain, zone boundaries — and familiar with energy isolation and lock-out/tag-out practice and with machine guarding expectations in a regulated workplace. Sound judgment about real risk, and the ability to write a defensible safety argument and defend it in person — to our own engineers and to a customer's operations leadership.

Hands-on:

taking measurements, using hand tools, reading electrical schematics, inspecting safety devices, and running functional verification tests. Credible with operators, mechanics, and supervisors. Willing to travel to and work on active industrial sites up to 25% of the time, domestically and internationally, including on short notice. Valid driver's license, and able to obtain site access credentials such as MSHA Part 46/48 training. Preferred Qualifications Autonomous or semi-autonomous heavy equipment — haul trucks, dozers, loaders, excavators, compactors, yard trucks — or AGV and AMR fleets in production use. Laying out, commissioning, or safeguarding an automated facility, work cell, plant, or yard operation. Assessing customer sites, training customer personnel, and supporting commercial teams in scoping sites. Requirements management and traceability tools, and safety case development. Familiarity with the published standards that govern this work:

ISO 12100

(risk assessment and risk reduction); ISO 13849 or

IEC 62061

(safety-related control systems and performance levels); ISO 13850, 13855, 13857, and 14119 (emergency stop, safeguard positioning and distances, andinterlocks). Familiarity with autonomous and mobile machinery standards:

ISO 17757, ISO 3691-4, ANSI/ITSDF B56.5, ISO 19014, ISO 21815, ISO

18497, and

ISO 25119.

Familiarity with

OSHA 29 CFR 1910

Subpart O and 1910.147;

MSHA 30 CFR

Parts 56 and 57;

NFPA 70E. EMESRT

design philosophies and ICMM vehicle interaction guidance. Certification such as

CMSE, CFSE, CFSP, T

ÜV Functional Safety Engineer, or CSP; familiarity with

IEC 61508, ISO

26262, or UL 4600.

Disclaimer:

Softpath System, LLC is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer committed to diversity in our workforce. We are dedicated to attracting and retaining the best-qualified people available, without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, disability or status as a veteran of the Armed Force.

Job Type:

Contract Work Location:

In person