Lead Functional Safety Engineer

Standard Bots is America's largest manufacturer of AI-native industrial robots. Full-stack robots—hardware, software, and AI—all designed and assembled in Glen Cove, New York. The company makes AI-native robots anyone can buy and deploy, with customers ranging from family-owned machine shops to the Fortune 500. Customers include Sunoco, Lockheed Martin, NASA, and the U.S. Army, along with hundreds of manufacturers nationwide. Standard Bots raised a $200 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation from RoboStrategy, General Catalyst, Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund, and Samsung Next.

*We're hiring a Lead, but if you're a strong functional safety engineer at Senior, Staff or Principal level, we still want to hear from you. We'll level the role and the offer to the person.

If you want a mature process to run, this isn't the role. If you want to build the safety organization behind the best cobot in the world, with the authority to do it, read on.

Standard Bots arms work right next to people, installed by customers who may have never set up a robot before, with no cage and no integrator's risk assessment to lean on. The robot has to be safe by design, and you'll be the one who proves it.

We want to build the best collaborative robot in the world, and that's impossible without building the safest one: a robot anyone can put next to their people on day one and trust. Most of the industry treats safety as paperwork at the end. We want it to be the thing our robots are known for — designed in from the first sketch and proven on real hardware.

Until now, safety has lived inside our hardware, firmware and test teams, like it does at most young companies that ship. That got our first robots out the door. It won't carry what's next: volume growing fast, several new products in development, and AI changing how robots are taught. So we're pulling safety into one strong team with its own mandate — and that team needs a leader.

Glen Cove, New York, is where our robots are built and tested and where the team's center of gravity sits, so this role requires 5 days/week onsite.

• The safety case. You own it across our products — analysis, architecture, and the certification plan that gets each robot through third-party assessment.

• The relationship with assessors. You're our technical voice toward notified bodies and NRTLs, and you're the one in the room defending the argument.

• Verification on real robots. Every safety function gets tested on hardware you trust, fault injection included. You stay hands-on — this is not a reviewing job.

• The team. You hire and lead the functional safety engineers who join after you, starting with one who leans electronics and controls and one who leans software.

• Safety in the design, not at the gate. You report to the Head of System Architecture and work daily with hardware, embedded firmware and test. Safety sits in design reviews from the first sketch.

• You've owned a safety case for a shipping robot and defended it to an external assessor.

• Every safety function has a verification on real hardware that you trust, including fault injection.

• Your decisions are in the safety architecture of our next generation of arms.

• Hardware and firmware engineers come to you early, because it saves them time.

• You've built a team that runs without you in the room, and set how Standard Bots works on safety.

• You've taken collaborative robots, or machinery of similar complexity, through third-party safety assessment — and you can tell us what went wrong.

• You work fluently in ISO 10218-1 and -2, ISO 13849-1 and -2, ISO 12100 and IEC 61508, and you have an opinion on the 2025 revision of ISO 10218.

• You can read a schematic and a firmware architecture well enough to challenge the engineers who wrote them.

• You know the full toolkit (FMEA, FTA, HAZOP, STPA, SISTEMA) and which one to reach for.

• You'd rather be on the test floor with a robot and a force gauge than in a document review.

• You know the difference between what the standard requires and what actually makes the robot safe, and you deliver both.

• For the Lead seat: you've led or mentored safety engineers, or you're ready to build a team for the first time.

You don't need to tick every box. If you're close — at any level — apply anyway. We'd rather meet you.

Nice to have

• You've worked on the assessor side, at a notified body or NRTL.

• You know mobile manipulators and AMRs: ANSI/RIA R15.08, ISO 3691-4.

• You've built or specified a safety controller rather than bought one.

• You've shipped at a startup and liked it.

The salary range for this role is $170,000 - $230,000, depending on experience. We are open to a variety of seniority levels for this role and will build compensation packages that are commensurate with seniority and skill level. Base salary is just one part of the overall compensation at Standard Bots. All Full-Time Employees are eligible for Employee Stock Options. We also offer a package of benefits including paid time off, medical/dental/vision insurance, life insurance, disability insurance, and 401(k) to regular full-time employees.