About the Position

Safety Validation Lead, Scenarios

San Francisco, CA

About the Role

Atoms is building the machines that power the next era of progress. We are changing the physical world by developing Physical AI-real-world robots for industries like food, mining, and transport. Our systems are designed to understand, predict, and control the real world with precision, making complex physical operations more reliable, scalable, and productive.

This role is crucial for ensuring the safety of our automated systems. You will own the safety-relevant scenarios we validate against, defining what makes a scenario safety-relevant, building the catalog, and owning the argument that it is sufficient.

Responsibilities

Relevance and Coverage: Define what makes a scenario safety-relevant for a given slice of the operating domain, and own the coverage position that follows. Keep the taxonomy and the abstraction levels coherent as the catalog grows.
Tooling: Build the tooling that turns relevance and coverage into a repeatable query rather than a judgment reconstructed from scratch each time, and that shows where a catalog has gone stale.
Both Sources: Own log-based extraction from fleet data and the criticality measures that surface candidates from it, and own the standardized crash-avoidance suites and the adaptation they need before they mean anything here.
Execution: Define how scenarios run and what a result from each method can and cannot support, and own the regression suite that keeps known failures from returning.
Interfaces: Designing the scenario is where the argument gets set up: it fixes which claim is being exercised, under what conditions, and what a result would mean. Whether a given run passes is evidence, and it is produced elsewhere - your part is that the scenario was the right one to run and that its outcome is interpretable against the claim.

Requirements

8+ years in safety validation, verification, or test engineering for automated vehicles, ADAS, or another safety-critical domain, hands-on rather than test management alone.
You have built or substantially shaped a scenario catalog scoped to a defined operating domain, and defended its sufficiency to someone who pushed back.
Hands-on with the crash-avoidance side of published consumer test protocols - Euro NCAP's Crash Avoidance protocols in the 2026 series, the ADAS component of US NCAP, or equivalent - and the judgment to adapt rather than transplant them.
ASAM OpenSCENARIO and OpenDRIVE, hands-on; ISO 21448 (SOTIF) and ISO 34502; and an informed view of where simulation evidence is credible and where it is not.
Strong Python and direct work with large volumes of vehicle log data, plus tooling other engineers ran for their own work rather than only your own.
Fluency with claim, argument, and evidence as distinct things. You can say what a result actually supports, and you do not present evidence as though it were the claim.

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.

We Offer

Competitive salary range: $182,000 - $231,000 per year.
Comprehensive benefits package including:
- 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

At Atoms, you’ll work on one of the defining challenges of our time-bringing automation into the physical world to drive real, lasting impact. We exist to uncover valuable unknown truths and turn them into progress, which means constantly pushing beyond what’s known and building what doesn’t yet exist. The work is ambitious and often challenging, but it’s grounded in a shared sense of purpose and a team committed to seeing it through together. Our work only matters if it serves others, and we know that meaningful progress depends on the trust of the people we serve and the strength of our team-so we invest in both, creating an environment where you can do your best work and grow.

What Else You Need to Know

This role is based in our San Francisco office. Atoms is a company driven by invention and continuous change - we are constantly reimagining our industries, building new products, and refining how we operate. We do our best work together. That’s why all of our office-based teams work onsite, five days a week.

Ready to join us as we serve those who serve others?

#LI-Onsite

Safety Validation Lead, Scenarios

Job description