Staff Safety Engineer, Safety Metrics and Benchmarking

The role

This person will lead the definition, development, and operationalization of safety metrics and benchmarking methodologies for Level 4 autonomous vehicle and robotaxi deployment. They will establish quantitative frameworks to measure safety performance across on-road testing, simulation, and external benchmarks.

What you will do

• Define, standardize, and maintain core AV safety performance indicators
• Establish standardized metric definitions and automated calculation pipelines
• Develop leading and lagging indicators to monitor safety performance
• Develop quantitative benchmarking frameworks against human-driving baselines and public datasets
• Evaluate comparability across operators and human drivers
• Establish scenario-based and exposure-normalized targets
• Apply statistical inference, uncertainty quantification, and risk modeling
• Develop methods to analyze rare and high-severity events
• Build collision severity and injury-risk models
• Provide technical leadership and cross-functional alignment

Required qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics, Data Science, or a related technical field
• 8+ years of experience in safety engineering, autonomous driving evaluation, statistical modeling, simulation-based validation, or AV risk assessment
• Proven track record of defining quantitative safety metrics, SPIs, surrogate safety measures, and human benchmark models
• Proficiency in Python and SQL
• Experience analyzing large-scale operational or safety-related datasets
• Strong expertise in statistical inference, rare-event analysis, counterfactual modeling, risk quantification, and release-readiness evaluation
• Proven ability to lead cross-functional technical initiatives and communicate complex findings clearly

Nice to have

• Master's or Ph.D. in a relevant technical or quantitative discipline
• Experience with Level 4 autonomous driving, robotaxi operations, or other safety-critical systems
• Experience benchmarking AV safety using public reports, regulatory disclosures, industry datasets, or published research
• Familiarity with scenario taxonomies, safety case frameworks, and industry standards such as UL 4600, ISO 21448 (SOTIF), ISO 8800, SAE J3237, and ISO 26262
• Experience with collision severity modeling, injury-risk prediction, or human benchmark datasets

Benefits

• Medical
• Dental
• Vision
• 401k with a company match
• Health saving accounts
• Life insurance
• Pet insurance

Before you apply

• All newly-hired employees are queried through E-Verify to verify identity and employment eligibility

About the company

Motional is a driverless technology company making autonomous vehicles a safe, reliable, and accessible reality. It is a joint venture between Hyundai Motor Group and Aptiv.