Staff Systems Engineer, Embedded Safety & Architecture

About the role

Waabi, founded by AI visionary Raquel Urtasun, is the leader in Physical AI. With a world-class team, we're unlocking the next era of autonomous transportation with technology that's powering commercial autonomous trucks and robotaxis. Waabi is backed by and partners with world leaders in AI, automotive, logistics, and deep tech.

With offices in Toronto, San Francisco, Dallas, and Pittsburgh, Waabi is growing quickly and looking for diverse, innovative and collaborative candidates who want to impact the world in a positive way.

Waabi builds generative AI for the physical world, starting with autonomous trucks. The intelligence only ships if the system underneath it is safe by design - and that safety has to be carried all the way down, from the vehicle-level safety concept into the embedded platform's requirements, architecture, and interfaces.

As a Systems Engineer on our Embedded Systems team, you'll own that translation. Our overarching systems and safety group defines the vehicle-level safety concept - the hazard analysis, the safety goals, the functional safety concept.

You'll be their embedded counterpart: taking that concept and decomposing it into an embedded architecture and technical safety requirements that our electrical engineering and embedded software groups can build against.

You'll live on the left side of the ISO 26262 V at the embedded level, turning a functional safety concept into technical requirements and a hardware/software architecture the whole team can trust - and you'll be the person who keeps the embedded org fluent in the wider world of automotive standards.

You Will…

Partner with the systems and safety group. Take the vehicle-level safety concept, safety goals, and functional safety requirements as your inputs, and feed embedded expertise back into their hazard analysis and concept work. You're the bridge between their concept and our hardware and firmware.

Own the embedded technical safety concept. Derive technical safety requirements from the functional safety concept allocated to the embedded system, and allocate each to the right architectural element.

Architect across hardware and software. Define the embedded system architecture and the hardware/software partition, including the hardware-software interface (HSI), so both groups design against one coherent picture.

Manage requirements and traceability. Maintain bidirectional traceability from the safety goals handed down to you all the way to hardware and software requirements, and keep the work products that feed the safety case.

Steward automotive standards for the embedded org. Stay current on the standards that apply to our work - functional safety, SOTIF, cybersecurity, autonomous-product safety, process and component qualification - and fold them into how the embedded team designs, documents, and works day to day.

Set up the right side of the V. Your requirements and architecture define what verification and validation later prove. You'll partner closely with the V&V effort - and support Development Interface Agreements (DIAs) with OEM partners and suppliers - without owning the downstream test execution yourself.

Qualifications

• BS/MS in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Systems Engineering, or a related field - or equivalent hands-on experience.
• 8+ years in embedded systems, with real depth spanning both hardware and software.

Strong ISO 26262 experience concentrated on the system-design phase (Part 4) and its handoffs to hardware (Part 5) and software (Part 6): deriving technical safety requirements from a functional safety concept, system architectural design, and hardware/software allocation.

Working familiarity with the broader automotive standards landscape - and the judgment to operationalize it - including SOTIF (ISO 21448), automotive cybersecurity (ISO/SAE 21434), autonomous-product safety cases (UL 4600), Automotive SPICE (ASPICE), and component/coding standards such as AEC-Q10.

• Fluency with requirements management and traceability - you've lived in a tool like Polarion and know why traceability matters when the safety case is questioned.
• Enough range to read a schematic and reason about embedded C/C++/Rust, so your hardware/software partitioning is grounded in what each side can actually implement.
• A clear grasp of the full V, so the left-side work you produce genuinely sets the right side up to succeed.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience standing up or maturing a standard (ASPICE, 21434, or similar) inside an engineering org, not just complying with one.
• SysML or model-based systems engineering.
• AV, ADAS, or other complex safety-critical domain experience.
• Direct experience authoring or negotiating DIAs with an OEM.