Head of Validation and Verification

The role

You will lead validation and verification by defining criteria for unsupervised deployments and serving as the technical authority on readiness. You will develop a validation architecture and grow a multidisciplinary team of engineers and data scientists.

What you will do

• Design safety validation metrics, scenario libraries, and architectural coverage.
• Develop a validation architecture that generalizes across platforms and tasks.
• Own requirements decomposition and traceability from mission-level intent through subsystems.
• Choose V&V strategy and infrastructure including simulation and on-site work.
• Validate sensing, compute, and actuation hardware and functional safety.
• Grow a team of software, systems, test, and hardware engineers plus data scientists.
• Define KPIs and decision-grade reporting for leadership, customers, and insurers.

Required qualifications

• BS or advanced degree in engineering, physics, or another technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 10+ years in test planning and experimental design for safety-critical autonomous or robotic systems.
• Track record building and leading multidisciplinary technical organizations.
• Depth in sensing and compute: cameras, lidar, radar, GNSS, IMUs, edge compute, embedded controllers.
• Fluency in data analysis and test automation (Python, C/C++).
• Experience running many parallel test activities across non-colocated teams, sites, and stakeholders.
• Judgment about when a claim is proven and when it merely looks proven.

Nice to have

• Taken a driverless or unsupervised system through to real deployment and held the readiness gate.
• Scaled a validation program across a heterogeneous fleet, multiple sites, or successive hardware generations.
• Authored or led a formal safety case, or contributed to safety standards work (UL 4600, ISO 26262, ISO 21448, or off-road equivalents).
• Functional safety experience on vertically integrated or custom hardware.
• Familiarity with heavy construction machines — excavators, articulated dump trucks, dozers, wheel loaders, motor graders.
• A record of external technical contribution: publications, keynotes, standards bodies, or research leadership.

About the company

Bedrock retrofits heavy equipment like excavators to perform fully autonomous work on live commercial job sites. The company has raised nearly $1B in total funding to expand into new machine types and tasks.