Vehicle Safety - Occupant Protection Engineer
- Salary
- USD 151,000 - 204,000 / per-year-salary
- Level
- Senior
- Work type
- On-site · Foster City
Not stated in the posting: visa.
Open. First seen 22 October 2026.
About the role
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
What this role asks for
Particular to this role
CATIA
Rare in Zoox's other 182 open postings.
Standard for software engineering roles
Python
Common in software engineering postings at any company.
Compared with Zoox's other open jobs.
The team: Vehicle Integration, Testing & Validation HIRES STEADILY
This role is one of 14 open in Vehicle Integration, Testing & Validation. 7 were posted in the last 30 days and the oldest in October: a team that hires all year rather than one being built.
WHAT THE TEAM WORKS WITH, ACROSS ITS POSTINGS
Jira (7 of 14), Machine Learning (7 of 14), Python (7 of 14), CATIA (3 of 14), Embedded Systems (3 of 14), CAN bus (2 of 14)
OTHER ROLES ON THIS TEAM
- Hardware Engineer - Test Development posted Oct 14
- Seating and Passive Safety HW Validation Engineer posted Oct 9
- CAE Engineer - Safety occupant posted Oct 6
- Sr. Electrical Integration Engineer - Diagnostics posted Sep 24
- Crash Safety Test and Validation Engineer posted Sep 24
- Validation Engineer, Feature Integration posted Sep 24
- Senior Validation Engineer, Suspension posted Aug 24
- Staff Electrical Architecture System Engineer posted Aug 20
- Staff Vehicle Attributes Engineer posted Jul 21
- Senior Technical Program Manager - Vehicle Attributes posted Jul 9
- Senior Energy Engineer posted Jun 26
- Senior Signal Integrity and EMC Engineer posted Jun 3
- Senior Vehicle Attributes Engineer posted Oct 27
From the team and dates on Zoox's own job board.
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