Safety Validation Lead, Scenarios

The role

You will own safety-relevant scenarios by defining relevance, building catalogs, and owning the coverage argument. You will build analysis pipelines and tooling to manage log-based and NCAP-based scenarios.

What you will do

• Define what makes a scenario safety-relevant for a given operating domain
• Own the coverage position and maintain taxonomy and abstraction levels
• Build tooling to turn relevance and coverage into repeatable queries
• Own log-based extraction from fleet data and criticality measures
• Own standardized crash-avoidance suites and their adaptation
• Define how scenarios run and own the regression suite
• Design scenarios to fix claims, conditions, and interpretable results
• Use AI tooling for scenario mining, categorization, and criticality assessment

Required qualifications

• 8+ years in safety validation, verification, or test engineering for automated vehicles, ADAS, or another safety-critical domain
• Hands-on experience building or shaping a scenario catalog and defending its sufficiency
• Hands-on with crash-avoidance side of published consumer test protocols such as Euro NCAP's Crash Avoidance protocols in the 2026 series or the ADAS component of US NCAP
• ASAM OpenSCENARIO and OpenDRIVE
• ISO 21448 (SOTIF) and ISO 34502
• Strong Python
• Direct work with large volumes of vehicle log data
• Fluency with claim, argument and evidence as distinct things

Nice to have

• Proving ground or closed-course test execution experience, including instrumented targets and test equipment
• Experience with falsification, adversarial scenario search, or criticality-driven parameter sampling
• Experience contributing scenario-based evidence to a safety case defended to an external party
• Background in traffic safety research, crash data analysis, or naturalistic driving studies
• Experience building validation infrastructure — scenario databases, resimulation at scale, CI for autonomy

Benefits

• Medical, Dental, Vision, Disability, and Life Insurance
• Flexible Spending Account / Health Savings Account Options
• 401(k)
• Equity
• Sick Time, Unlimited Flexible Time Off, and Paid Holidays
• Paid Parental Leave
• Pre-Tax Commuter Benefit Plan
• Team lunch in our SoMa office every Tuesday and Thursday

About the company

Atoms builds Physical AI—real-world robots for the industries that move civilization forward, starting with food, mining, and transport. They are roboticists, engineers, operators, and builders.