Lead Test Engineer AV Safety Assurance

Job description

Job responsibilities

• Own the safety gates. What counts as a safety-relevant finding, how it is classified and escalated, the criteria that hold a merge or a release, and how findings are tracked to closure with the recurring ones feeding…
• Own the acceptance criteria. Decide what we measure at each gate from collisions and near misses to right-of-way and hard braking where the thresholds sit, and move them as the technology changes.
• Own the safety report. Define the format the whole QA team writes to: comparable between runs, explicit about what was not covered, and short enough to be read before a decision rather than after it.
• Coach the QA team. Run calibration sessions, review reports, and teach the reasoning behind the criteria, so that safety judgement is something the team applies on its own rather than something you add at review.
• Be the safety voice in the release decision. Releases are decided by a review that brings together engineering, safety and operations.
• Connect hazards to evidence. Take hazard analysis output STPA, FMEA, HAZOP through to what our scenario set has to contain, through to results, through to something our safety case can stand on.
• Work with the safety organization. Translate the safety framework into testable requirements with our Head of Safety, and work with development and analytics on the tooling that makes those requirements measurable.
• Keep up with the rules that apply to us. Track the standards and regulation governing driverless operation in Texas and beyond, and bring what matters into how we test.

Job requirements

• 7+ years in testing, verification or validation, including ownership of something that outlived your involvement — a gate, a review, a reporting standard.
• Experience where being wrong had physical consequences. Autonomous vehicles, aviation, medical devices, rail, industrial automation, defence — the field matters far less than the habits it builds: claims backed by…
• Hazard-driven thinking. You start from what can go wrong and work forward to what would have to be tested to know — and you can work with the output of a hazard analysis rather than needing it translated for you.
• Comfort with residual risk. You can say what we do not know and how much of it we are accepting, without overstating it and without smoothing it away.
• Influence without authority. Much of this job is persuading engineers and QA colleagues to change how they work because your argument is good, not because you can require it.
• A habit of checking the number yourself. When a safety metric looks wrong, you go to the data behind it rather than accepting the dashboard.
• Fluent use of LLMs as a working tool — reading through standards, logs and results quickly, and drafting the documents this role produces.
• Excellent written English. Other people's decisions rest on your documents.