Vehicle Safety - Occupant Protection Engineer
Zoox · San Francisco
Manufacturing & OperationsVehicle DevelopmentOn-siteFull-time
Zoox is hiring a Vehicle Safety - Occupant Protection Engineer in San Francisco, California (on-site, full-time). Posted 24 September 2026. Apply directly on Zoox's own careers site — no account needed.
At Zoox we have set the goal to provide our customers with the highest level of safety while using our fully autonomous vehicles. As a member of the Zoox Vehicle Safety Engineering team you will work with a team of world-class engineers with diverse backgrounds such as robotics, control, and vehicle engineering. You will be responsible for developing occupant protection system performance and you will be involved all the way through the complete vehicle development process from conception to part, system and full vehicle crash testing. You will be working closely with our internal and external safety experts, CAE and module system teams, with our suppliers as well as internal and external test laboratories. Working at Zoox offers you the chance to manifest your technical creativity, utilize your excellent organizational and communication skills and make a big difference in the final product.
In this role, you will:
- Own assigned load cases end-to-end: translate vehicle technical specification (VTS) safety targets into testable metrics, and drive restraint system development through the vehicle integration process to meet them
- Develop virtual and physical DVPs and track execution against plan
- Analyze test results, feedback analysis to engineering teams, and report out at project gateways
- Support system-level and full-vehicle test activities, including defining test requests, test matrix, instrumentation and test targets with the support of the validation team
- Identify and document performance issues; generate and track Jira tickets to closure
- Drive CAE-to-physical test correlation for your load cases
Qualifications
- BS or MS in Engineering with passion for electric, autonomous mobility
- 5+ years of experience within automotive development and testing, preferable safety testing
- Sound knowledge of FMVSS regulations and consumer safety protocols
- Experience in virtual and physical safety testing, including analysis in Hyperworks/MetaPost
- Ability to build and script templates for first-pass data integrity checks, results analysis, and reporting
- Strong organizational and communication skills
- Experience in 3D design and PLM tools, CATIA 3DX or CATIA V5 preferred
Bonus Qualifications
- Project management experience
- Experience with Jira
- DFMEA and SFMEA knowledge; experience with requirements management tools (Polarion or equiv.)
- Knowledge of Python
- Experience with LS-Dyna
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