---
title: 'Senior System Safety Engineer- Robot Stability at Rhoda AI'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-system-safety-engineer-robot-stability-rhoda-ai-mountain-view-4wzr6tw3r49a'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-09'
---

# Senior System Safety Engineer- Robot Stability at Rhoda AI

- **Company:** Rhoda AI
- **Location:** Mountain View, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Posted:** 2026-03-10
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-09
- **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.

Summary This is a Senior MTS position reporting directly to the Head of Safety and Certification. The Safety Systems Engineer-Robot Stability will own the design, implement, and optimize control systems that enable robust balance, posture maintenance, and dynamic locomotion in humanoid robots.

This role sits at the intersection of AI, functional safety, and robotics — responsible for ensuring that the robot's AI-driven perception, planning, and control behaviors meet the requirements of the broader humanoid robot safety standard ecosystem. You will assess risks introduced by dynamic robot behaviors, define robot safety requirements for stability, lead verification through data collection and analysis, and build the evidence packages needed for formal certification. The role requires a technical executor with a bias for action, impeccable rigor, and the ability to drive cross-disciplinary teams. The candidate must demonstrate deep technical credibility.

## Key Responsibilities

- Develop safety requirements for Robot Stability through analysis, empirical derivation, and testing
- Derive requirements for performance and stability of advanced control algorithms for whole-body stability, balance, and posture regulation in humanoid platforms
- Architect fail-safe methodology for robot stability to influence design and implementation of real-time controllers (e.g., ZMP, MPC, inverse dynamics, whole-body control)
- Define requirements, performance and fail-safe methods for sensor feedback (IMU, force/torque, vision) for state estimation and disturbance rejection
- Invent novel and improve existing techniques for robustness against external perturbations, uneven terrain, and dynamic interactions
- Collaborate with perception, planning, and hardware teams to ensure seamless system integration
- Simulate, test, and validate control strategies in both virtual environments and physical robots
- Contribute to safety-critical features, including fall prevention and recovery strategies

Required Qualifications

- MS or PhD in Robotics, Control Systems, Mechanical Engineering, or related field
- Strong background in dynamics, kinematics, and control theory
- Experience with humanoid or legged robot control systems
- Proficiency in Python for data analysis
- Hands-on experience with simulation tools (e.g., MuJoCo, Gazebo, Isaac Sim)
- Familiarity with state estimation techniques (e.g., Kalman filters, sensor fusion)
- Hands-on experience with data collection and data analysis in Verification and Validation

## Preferred Qualifications

- Experience with whole-body control frameworks and optimization-based control (QP, MPC)
- Knowledge of contact dynamics and multi-body systems
- Hands-on experience with dFMEA, STPA, Fault Tree Analysis
- Experience with reinforcement learning applied to locomotion or balance
- Proficiency in C with language extensions for MISRA C for real-time systems
- Experience with applying ISO/TS 15066 and ISO/TS 25785-1
- Background in safety-critical or functional safety systems (e.g., ISO 26262, IEC 61508)
- Experience deploying algorithms on embedded or edge compute platforms

## 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)

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