Staff Functional Safety Engineer, Product Safety Team

What to Expect

As a member of the Product Safety Engineering group, you will be at the forefront of ensuring the safety of Tesla's products across Vehicles, Energy, and Robotics. Our team is responsible for understanding extreme real-world scenarios to inform the design of our products, helping us lead the industry in handling these conditions.

We're seeking a Staff Functional Safety Engineer for future vehicle platforms—work that spans many systems and technologies and carries broad impact and high organizational exposure. You will own vehicle-level functional safety strategy from architecture through launch, build and lead a small team, and partner closely with AI, firmware, hardware, and systems teams on interfaces, assumptions, and failure modes.

What You’ll Do

• Own end-to-end functional safety strategy for assigned future-vehicle platforms and features, from early architecture through validation and launch readiness
• Build and lead a small team of functional safety engineers
• Define and drive system-level functional safety analyses and requirements that span mechanical, electrical, and software domains
• Partner with hardware, systems, AI platform, and firmware teams so interfaces, assumptions, and failure modes are explicitly owned and validated; serve as a functional safety integration point across these domains
• Lead functional safety activities such as Hazard Analysis and Risk Assessment (HARA), FMEA, and Safety Concept development for multi-system features; translate findings into actionable design, test, and process requirements
• Establish functional safety validation strategies that combine simulation, lab, vehicle, and fleet evidence; track residual risk and drive closure with design owners
• Represent functional safety in architecture reviews, program forums, and executive discussions; communicate trade-offs and risk clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders

What You’ll Bring

• Degree in Mechanical, Electrical, Systems, or Automotive Engineering, or equivalent experience
• Staff-level technical depth: typically 8+ years in functional safety, vehicle systems, product safety, systems engineering, or safety-critical product development
• Demonstrated experience leading or building a small technical team, or clear readiness and desire to do so
• Proven ability to work across diverse vehicle systems and technologies. Comfort at the vehicle and system level rather than deep specialization in a single domain
• Experience defining functional safety requirements, interfaces, and validation plans for complex multi-disciplinary products
• Working knowledge of automotive functional safety methods and standards (e.g., ISO 26262, HARA, FMEA, safety concepts) applied at vehicle or feature level
• Ability to interface effectively with AI, software, and firmware organizations: ask the right questions, challenge assumptions, and align on interface-level functional safety
• Seasoned communication skills, with comfort presenting risk, trade-offs, and recommendations to senior stakeholders
• Practical, hands-on, can-do attitude with a bias to drive issues to closure in a fast-moving environment
• Vehicle bring-up, field issue investigation, or production launch experience a plus