DoD System Safety Engineer

About Forterra

Forterra is a leading provider of autonomous systems for ground-based movement in the working world. Amongst some of the earliest innovators in the field of driverless technology, Forterra is focused on building systems that protect front-line soldiers and enable civilian workers in our industrial base. Forterra is the go-to provider of ground autonomy solutions for the U.S. Department of Defense, which harnesses the technology for asymmetric warfare in critical conditions.

About the role

• Forterra is looking for a DoD System Safety Engineer to join our team and support our safety design on autonomous vehicle systems. 

What you'll do

• Work across Forterra to design safety into our autonomous vehicle systems from the ground up – focusing on defense applications which follow A MIL-STD-882E approach
• Tackle the topics of functional safety, embedded systems and software safety in a complex system environment
• Work to define safety architecture, safety concepts and derive requirements from safety analyses
• Tackle new, non-standard, cross-functional challenges for which you will have to decompose the problems on the fly and drive them to completion even in the absence of standard methods or processes
• Work with engineering teams from concept through implementation, representing the consideration of safety in the design throughout the process
• Provide technical safety leadership on elements of significant scope
• Perform systems & safety analysis activities, including on autonomy-related safety
• Communicate design considerations and progress with respect to system safety across the engineering organization
• Communicate effectively to make recommendations and drive consensus amongst all stakeholders (executive team, product, customer, engineering, test)
• Other duties as assigned

Qualifications

• A minimum of 8+ years of work experience as a Systems Safety engineer or related role
• Strong record working in the field of system safety as it relates to hardware, software and system-level design
• Strong expertise with MIL-STD-882E and safety critical system design best practices
• Technical domain knowledge of autonomous vehicles or similar autonomous robotic systems
• Strong Systems Engineering fundamentals and knowledge of modern systems engineering techniques, tools and processes.
• Expertise with safety analysis techniques such as FTA, PHA, FHA, SSHA, FMEA,  and FMECA
• Expertise with hazard identification, tracking, and mitigation using tools such as PHL and HTS
• Expertise evaluating software control categories and severities to identify appropriate Software Criticality Indexes (SwCI)
• Experience using SwCI to inform identification and gathering of Level of Rigor (LOR) evidence and carrying out LOR tasks to support risk mitigation claims
• Experience leading (or participating in) test and evaluation planning, preparation of test event Safety Releases, conducting post-test event actions, and maintaining reports
• Expertise performing and documenting Safety Assessment Reports (SAR) to provide a comprehensive evaluation of the status of safety hazards and their associated risks
• Expertise in safety requirement authorship and management
• Hands-on experience in software design patterns and principles of scalable software
• Experience with embedded software and/or automotive software ecosystems and frameworks
• Deep knowledge about system software development, operating systems and distributed systems architectures
• Good understanding of high-performance computing related software infrastructures
• Experience with requirements management tools such as Jama or DOORS
• Strong communication skills and the ability to communicate complex engineering issues to a diverse team
• Flexible, adaptable mindset, open-minded: we try to solve a problem that has never been solved before. Multiple opinions exist on how to do so but nobody has the absolute truth until it is actually done: you know that, and you embrace it, you are open to multiple perspectives
• Experience applying functional safety concepts to autonomous vehicles and/or high-performance computing a major plus
• Proven programming/software