Functional Safety Manager

Title: Functional Safety Manager
Location: Southfield, MI 48076

REQUIRED: ISO 26262 Parts 4, 5, and 6 are a must, and the candidate shall be strong in Parts 3, 2, and 9.

Primary Responsibilities

Functional Safety Management and Governance

• Develop, tailor, maintain, and drive the project functional safety plan, including lifecycle activities, work products, milestones, roles, dependencies, reviews, audits, and assessments.
• Define the Development Interface Agreement or equivalent responsibility model across OEM, Tier-1, semiconductor, software, and engineering-service partners.
• Establish project safety governance, review cadence, decision rights, escalation paths, evidence expectations, and approval gates.
• Monitor functional safety progress, quality, open findings, and delivery risk; provide concise status reporting to program and engineering leadership.
• Coordinate confirmation reviews, functional safety audits, and functional safety assessments with the required level of independence.
• Ensure competence management, resource planning, and role clarity for safety-related activities.
• Govern safety impact analysis for changes, defects, deviations, re-use, carry-over elements, and variant introduction.
• Maintain the safety case strategy and assure that claims, arguments, and evidence remain complete, consistent, and configuration-controlled.

Required Qualifications and Experience

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Electronics Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Systems Engineering, or a related discipline. A master's degree is preferred.
• Typically 10+ years of automotive embedded-system development experience, including substantial functional safety responsibility and at least 3 years in a technical lead, safety manager, or equivalent coordination role.
• Demonstrated working knowledge of ISO 26262:2018, with strong applied depth in Parts 4, 5, and 6 and good understanding of Parts 2, 3, 8, and 9.
• Experience managing safety activities for ASIL-rated systems and coordinating work products across system, hardware, and software teams.
• Hands-on experience with safety requirements, safety architecture, safety analyses, verification planning, traceability, change impact analysis, and safety-case evidence.
• Experience participating in or preparing for functional safety reviews, audits, or assessments.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain complex safety matters to engineering teams, suppliers, customers, and leadership.

Essential Technical Competencies

Added Advantage: ADAS and Automated-Driving Domain

Desirable Domain Experience

• Knowledge of ADAS and automated-driving architectures is an added advantage, particularly where functional safety must be coordinated with perception, sensor fusion, localization, planning, control, vehicle networks, and degraded-operation strategies.
• Understanding of camera, radar, lidar, ultrasonic, and vehicle-motion sensor interfaces and common failure modes.
• Familiarity with ADAS domain controllers, centralized compute, sensor fusion, vehicle control, and fail-operational or degraded-operation concepts.
• Awareness of the relationship between ISO 26262 functional safety, ISO 21448 SOTIF, cybersecurity engineering, and AI/ML safety considerations.
• Experience with scenario-based validation, SIL, MIL, HIL, vehicle testing, fault injection, data replay, or large-scale test evidence for ADAS functions.
• Understanding of operational design domain, perception limitations, fallback strategies, driver interaction, and safety monitoring.