Product Safety Engineer

RIVR, part of Amazon is a robotics company pioneering Physical AI through real-world doorstep delivery. Founded in 2024 as an ETH Zurich spin-off, RIVR developed wheeled-legged robots designed to operate in complex, unstructured environments such as stairs, gates, doors, and uneven urban terrain. We believe that achieving general physical intelligence requires solving real customer problems in the real world, where robots can learn from rich operational data at scale.

Following our acquisition by Amazon in March 2026, we are continuing this mission with greater reach and speed. By combining custom robot hardware, onboard autonomy, and cloud-based coordination, RIVR, part of Amazon is building the next generation of safe, reliable autonomous robots for last-mile delivery

• Lead the hazard and risk analysis for the entire robotic system. You will identify and assess risks arising from component failures, system interactions, and real-world operation, including where hardware meets software (e.g., sensor failures, latency issues, mechanical stress, and degraded environmental conditions), and define the technical and operational requirements needed to mitigate them.

• Own product-level safety across RIVR's robotic platforms, ensuring safety considerations are integrated into system architecture, design decisions, and development workflows from early stages through deployment.

• Work closely with hardware, embedded, software, product and QA engineers to translate safety requirements into concrete technical solutions and design constraints.

• Act as a technical safety counterpart in design reviews, change discussions, and trade-off decisions, providing clear, engineering-grounded input rather than post-hoc compliance feedback.

• Define safety goals, assumptions, and acceptance criteria for robotic behavior in public and semi-structured environments.

• Define and evaluate operational safety concepts for robots deployed in public environments, including safe operating limits, degraded modes, human supervision concepts and emergency response strategies.

• Contribute to the design of safe system behaviors, including fallback strategies, degradation modes, redundancy concepts, and operational limits.

• Support the definition and review of safety-relevant test strategies, simulations, and field validations in collaboration with engineering and test teams.

• Assess test results, simulation outcomes, and field data from a safety perspective, and feed findings back into hazard analysis and system design.

• Maintain clear and traceable safety documentation, including hazard logs, safety concepts, requirements, and rationales, to support internal alignment and external review.

• Develop and maintain the product safety case, ensuring safety claims are supported by clear engineering evidence, validation results and documented risk assessments.

• Support certification, regulatory readiness, and market deployment by providing safety evidence and technical input in collaboration with legal and operations teams.

• Help establish scalable safety processes and practices as the Safety, Compliance & Regulations function grows.

• Bachelor's degree or higher in aerospace, automotive, electronic, industrial engineering or a related technical field.

• Experience in product safety, systems safety or functional safety for complex electromechanical products such as robotics, autonomous systems, automotive or industrial automation.

• Strong experience with hazard and risk analysis methodologies (e.g., FMEA, FTA, HARA) applied to real systems.

• Solid technical understanding of robotic systems, including hardware-software interaction, sensing, actuation, and control.

• Ability to work credibly and effectively with senior hardware and software engineers.

• Familiarity with relevant safety standards and regulatory frameworks (e.g., ISO 13482, ISO 13849, ISO 12100, ISO 26262, SOTIF, machine safety directives).

• Comfortable operating in ambiguity and early-stage environments, where structure is still being built.

• Clear communicator who can explain safety concerns pragmatically, not dogmatically

• Experience with autonomous systems, mobile robots, or field-deployed robotic products.

• Exposure to perception systems (LiDAR, cameras, radar) and their safety limitations.

• Background in human-robot interaction or public-space deployment.

• Experience supporting certification, regulatory approval, or external audits.

• Familiarity with incident analysis, near-miss investigation, or safety feedback loops from field data.

• Experience with ISO technical committees.