---
title: 'Senior System Safety Engineer - Perception at Rhoda AI'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-system-safety-engineer-perception-rhoda-ai-mountain-view-4wzr6tw3r49a'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-04'
---

# Senior System Safety Engineer - Perception at Rhoda AI

- **Company:** Rhoda AI
- **Location:** Mountain View, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Posted:** 2026-11-03
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-04
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/rhoda-ai/6a0d4141-9114-4a67-924c-a7f4486a1f63/application

**Skills:** Hazard Analysis and Risk Assessment, Functional Safety, IEC 61508, ISO 26262, System-level analysis, Test benches, Measurement, Root-cause analysis, Verification and Validation, HIL, SIL, Humanoid robotics, Automotive robotics, Autonomous mobile robots (AMR), Industrial automation, Laser sensors, LiDAR, Time-of-flight cameras, FMEDA, Safety-critical architectures

> The Staff System Safety Engineer performs hazard analysis, risk assessment, and functional safety requirements development for humanoid humanoid robots. The role involves system-level analyses, test case development, and validation using HIL and SIL environments to ensure safety compliance in complex electromechanic...

## Job description

At Rhoda AI, we’re building the next generation of generalist intelligent robots. We own the full robotics stack from high-performance hardware and robot systems to the infrastructure and state-of-the-art foundation world models that control our robots. Our robots are designed to be generalists capable of operating in complex, real-world environments and handling long-tail edge cases, made possible by our cutting edge research and end-to-end system design. We've raised over $450M and are investing aggressively in model research, infrastructure, hardware development, and manufacturing scale-up to make generalist robotics a reality. You'll own the safety requirements and safety evidence for the robot's perception path, end to end: from the sensors and their data links, through detection and decision logic, to the robot's response. You'll make sure the path is deterministic, auditable and explainable, and that it meets its safety targets.

## What You’ll Do

- Algorithms: Own the end-to-end safety targets and performance of perception algorithms used in robot’s collision avoidance system, develop evidence that design meets them
- Requirements: Derive by engineering analysis system safety requirements for detection performance, classification accuracy, KPIs, identifying and effectively mitigating malfunctions, degradation in performance, and edge cases
- SOTIF: Develop detection and mitigation strategies within SOTIF framework and own SOTIF performance from developing requirements to analyzing VnV test data
- Calibration: Set safety requirements for calibration accuracy, drift detection and recalibration triggers, and analyze data for trends and drifts
- Error budgets: Set the safety limits for the sensor-to-actuator error budget, check that the allocation stays inside them, contribute to trade studies and influence hardware/software designs
- Software safety: Create safety concept and the safety requirements for its implementation, working closely with Software Engineering team, achieving safety-compliant software implementation
- Sensor hardware: Define safety requirements for safety-related sensors (diagnostics, fault detection, failure rates), review supplier safety manuals and be a critical partner in sensor selection, and specify the qualification evidence needed and drive verification.
- Safety work products: Generate work products towards Robot Safety Case, drive reviews and approvals with an NRTL

## What We’re Looking For

- Algorithms: Expertise in deterministic, auditable, explainable computer vision algorithms used for perception
- Requirements: Experience in analytically and empirically deriving engineering requirements with numerical pass/fail constraints to physical performance expressed in distance, time, speed, etc.
- SOTIF: Proven record of developing SOTIF work products for a safety-related robotic or automotive system
- Calibration: Experience creating calibration fixtures, defining calibration processes and driving failure and trend analysis of field data
- Error budgets: Experience deriving and allocating error budgets, experience in developing analysis backed by data to inform trade studies to achieve compliance with error budgets
- Software safety: Strong background in safety-critical embedded software, real-time operating systems, computer vision algorithms, and safety-compliant C/C++ development
- Sensor hardware: Experience with Lidars, Cameras, Time-of-Flight sensors, Radars, Ultrasonics, other sensing technologies and related sensor pipeline hardware and state of art methodologies used in safety-related context

## Preferred

- MS or PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering or Robotics with focus on Computer Vision and Embedded Systems
- Experience creating work products for Functional Safety and SOTIF and successfully passing an audit by an NRTL
- Experience with safety-rated compute hardware with strong vision processing capabilities
- Experience designing safety architectures and documenting requirements within the context of IEC 61508 or ISO 26262
- Experience with embedded software system developed with compliance to MISRA C, ISO 26262-6 or IEC 61508-3
- Perception Sensors Functional Safety background from automotive industry

## About Rhoda AI

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Rhoda AI builds robot foundation models that learn from internet-scale video to enable manipulation-capable robots to generalize in real-world industrial environments.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed + Series A; $680M total funding)
- **Headquarters**: Palo Alto, CA, United States
- **Founded**: 2024
- **Founders**: Jagdeep Singh (CEO), Eric Chan (Chief Scientist), Changan Chen (Chief Research Officer), Andrew Wooten, Gordon Wetzstein (Scientific Advisor) [rhoda.ai/team](https://www.rhoda.ai/team)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Hardware
- **Target customers**: B2B – industrial enterprises in automotive, manufacturing, logistics, and e-commerce
- **Mission/purpose**: “Building at the frontier of embodied intelligence” and “Designing intelligence for the real world” – deploying general-purpose robot foundation models that adapt to the variability of commercial and industrial environments. [rhoda.ai](https://www.rhoda.ai/) | [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/rhoda-ai)

## Products & Services
- **Rhoda Robot Platform (Hardware + Software)**: A turnkey robotic system with custom actuators (25kg rated, 40kg peak payload), safety-rated vision, wheel-base, and brakes in every actuator. The platform runs the **Direct Video Action** model, which pre-trains on over a million real-world videos and post-trains on task-specific robot data. Long-context windows enable single-shot learning from human demonstrations without retraining. [rhoda.ai](https://www.rhoda.ai/)
- **FutureVision Intelligence Layer**: A proprietary architecture that handles real-world industrial tasks autonomously by generalizing beyond conventional VLA pipelines. [rhoda.ai](https://www.rhoda.ai/)
- **Deployment Services**: End-to-end solutions for tasks such as returns processing, bearing decanting, container breakdown, and material transport in logistics and e-commerce facilities. [rhoda.ai](https://www.rhoda.ai/)

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not publicly disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total funding **$680M** – Seed round $67.4M (April 2024), Series A $162.6M (April 2025), and Series A $450M (March 2026) with 4 investors. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/rhoda-ai)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Not individually named in available sources; partners include customers in automotive, manufacturing, logistics, and e-commerce. [rhoda.ai](https://www.rhoda.ai/)
- **Growth Signals**: Headcount growth of **+20% monthly** (LinkedIn reports 55 employees; Built In reports 73 employees – conflicting data). Talent sourced from companies like QuantumScape, Flexiv Robotics, Scale AI, Google, Meta, NVIDIA, and Stanford University. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/rhoda-ai) | [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/rhoda-ai)

## Competitive Advantages
- **Direct Video Action architecture** with web-scale video pre-training gives a strong prior on motion, physics, and dynamics, enabling generalization beyond lab settings.
- **Custom high-performance actuators** (25kg rated, 40kg peak) with safety-rated brakes and vision – designed for 3+ years of continuous operation at rated payload.
- **Long-context in-context learning** allows the robot to perform tasks single-shot from human demonstrations without retraining.
- **Turnkey industrial deployments** that handle ambiguity and variability (e.g., debris, transparent bags, heavy boxes) – tasks customers initially believed could not be automated. [rhoda.ai](https://www.rhoda.ai/)

## Strategic Focus
- Scaling robot intelligence through a pre-training/post-training paradigm, moving from controlled labs to reliable production environments.
- Expanding commercial deployments across automotive, manufacturing, logistics, and e-commerce verticals.
- Pursuing a path to **physical AGI** by combining foundation models with custom hardware for real-world adaptability. [rhoda.ai](https://www.rhoda.ai/)

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: “Building at the frontier of embodied intelligence” – emphasis on hard problems, first-principles thinking, and category-defining systems. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/rhoda-ai)
- **Work policy**: Hybrid workspace (employees combine remote and on-site work), with offices in Mountain View and Palo Alto, CA. [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/rhoda-ai)
- **Engineering culture**: Strong research focus (Chief Research Officer, Chief Scientist, many research engineers/scientists). Recent job postings include Research Scientist, Robot Perception Engineer, Mechanical Engineer, Fullstack Engineer, and Product Manager. [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/rhoda-ai)
- **Notable perks**: Not explicitly listed, but the company is well-funded ($680M) and at an early stage (founded 2024), offering significant growth opportunity and impact.

## Sources
1. [rhoda.ai](https://www.rhoda.ai/) – Company website (product, technology, commercial applications)
2. [rhoda.ai/careers](https://www.rhoda.ai/careers) – Careers page
3. [rhoda.ai/team](https://www.rhoda.ai/team) – Leadership team and co-founders
4. [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/rhoda-ai) – Built In profile (employee count, offices, job listings, hybrid policy)
5. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/rhoda-ai) – LinkedIn company page (funding, headcount, executive list, talent sources)

## Other roles at Rhoda AI

- [Senior/Staff TPM - Hardware](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-staff-tpm-hardware-rhoda-ai-mountain-view-1gs3k8kf579p) — Mountain View, CA
- [Senior TPM - Software & Controls](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-tpm-software-controls-rhoda-ai-mountain-view-y3vxhv09ttb9) — Mountain View, CA
- [Senior Inference Optimization ML Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-inference-optimization-ml-engineer-rhoda-ai-mountain-view-s9kmbmmt2gmk) — Mountain View, CA
- [Senior / Staff Technical Program Manager, AI Research](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-staff-technical-program-manager-ai-research-rhoda-ai-mountain-view-vwmnc9zskvbs) — Mountain View, CA
- [Marketing Communications Senior Associate](https://feeny.ai/job/marketing-communications-senior-associate-rhoda-ai-mountain-view-vmkhppnjbaa4) — Mountain View, CA
- [Software Engineer, Rhoda Platform](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-rhoda-platform-rhoda-ai-mountain-view-118z5qm9f5q0) — Mountain View, CA
- [Software Engineer Intern, Rhoda Platform](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-intern-rhoda-platform-rhoda-ai-mountain-view-3s3s0rkqmbkw) — Mountain View, CA
- [Software Engineer Intern, Inference](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-intern-inference-rhoda-ai-mountain-view-0yz1xmmcxnsq) — Mountain View, CA
- [Technical Program Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/technical-program-manager-rhoda-ai-mountain-view-1vmebb3sybwj) — Mountain View, CA
- [Solution Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/solution-engineer-rhoda-ai-mountain-view-1fkt9bqkr8g7) — Mountain View, CA