Associate Director, Humanoid Systems Safety

The Systems Engineering, Integration, and Test (SEIT) Department of Boston Dynamics (BD) seeks a safety and reliability (S&R) technical leader and people manager for its Atlas humanoid product program.  The Associate Director of Systems Safety & Reliability will grow and manage a team of safety systems engineers, reliability engineers, failure analysis engineers, and data analysts in the planning, execution, and verification of S&R.  This is a strategically critical position which will provide leadership to the two most important performance attributes of what will be the world’s most capable, safe, and reliable humanoid.  

The ideal candidate has deep technical expertise in both safety and reliability engineering. They thrive in a highly collaborative environment, despite ambiguous and rapid evolution of mind-blowing technology.  Exceptional people leadership skills are just as critical as technical prowess. Empowerment oriented, but also desires to roll up their sleeves for direct hands-on work at our headquarters in Waltham, MA.  This role will interact a great deal across other Atlas teams, especially Hardware, Software, Program Mngt, Systems Engrg and Testing.  The Associate Director works closely with two important corporate teams responsible for Safety Technology and Regulatory Compliance.

How you will make an impact:

• Work with employees and peers to develop effective safety and reliability strategies, efficient processes, and needed infrastructure.  Identify and leverage best practices supporting the needs of a growing product team.

• Oversee safety and reliability engineering requirement development, lifecycle management, compliance forecasting, and verification.  

• Support system risk assessment and management, including HARA, DFMEA, accelerated life and robustness testing, from robot subsystems up to overall product ecosystem (both verification and validation). 

• Lead or support safety case development, including coordination of supporting cross-functional evidence gathering.

• Provide training and coaching across the team to ensure every product subsystem is meeting S&R expectations.  Justify, evangelize, and ensure product team delivery of all critical S&R requirements.

• Oversee failure analysis, root cause identification, corrective action planning, and execution to ensure rapid issue closure and reliability growth from early prototype system testing, customer pilots, field testing, and into mass production. Ensure issues receive needed cross-functional attention & resolution.

• Technical project management skills, including resource planning, work planning, risk management, prioritization, conflict management, change management, issue resolution, and progress reporting.

Required Skills:

• Exceptional interpersonal and leadership skills.

• 10+ years of relevant product development experience.

• Deep technical expertise in the engineering of safety-critical autonomous systems.

• BS in Engineering (MS Electrical, Computer, Systems, and/or Mechanical Engrg preferred).

Desired Skills:

• Deep technical experience in product reliability.

• 5+ years embedded electromechanical product system design and development experience.

• 7+ years of experience leading cross-functional engineering efforts in applications of robotics, autonomous vehicles, advanced driver-assistance systems, industrial automation, or related industries.  This includes leading engineers, data scientists, failure analysts, and technicians; overseeing experts in systems, software, hardware, and testing functions.

• Experience releasing a complex electromechanical system into mass production.

• Exceptional verbal and written communication skills with engineering teams and executives.  Ability to author technical documentation, navigate deep technical analysis with expert engineers, and deliver high-level summaries to an executive audience.

• Experience developing safety goals, safety concepts, and safety cases, including compilation of data to support safety claims, especially for autonomous systems.

• Experience leading engineering teams through structured safety, reliability, & robustness methods, including HARA, DFMEA, PFMEA, DVP&R, DOE, Fault Tree Analysis, and root cause analysis.

• Deep knowledge of one or more relevant safety standards, including IEC 61508, ISO 26262,  ANSI/RIA R15.08, ISO 13849, ISO 21448, ISO/TS 22440, and ISO TS 15066.

• Diagnostics and fault management.  Fault insertion testing.

• Structured problem solving methods (8D, Six Sigma, Is/Is-not, Ishikawa).

• Analysis of software log data to identify failure causes.

• Experience with corrective action reporting processes and systems, ideally across multiple companies, along with experience creating and improving such systems.

• Authoring, reviewing, and approving a wide variety of requirements. 

• Highly relevant design domains include DC motors, controllers, gear trains, bearings, encoders, transducers, cameras, user interfaces, 2-way audio, PCBAs, flex circuits, wire harnesses, slip rings, radios, microcontrollers, protective padding & shells, batteries & BMS, end effectors, structural housings & linkages.

• Software tools including Jama, Jira, Google Suite, Testrails, Python, Matlab, Reliasoft or other statistical analysis tools.  Data analysis using tools such as Looker or Tableau.  

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