Head of Validation and Systems Engineering at Bedrock Robotics in San Francisco, CA

Job description

Join the team bringing autonomy to the built world At Bedrock, we're moving AI out of the lab and onto real job sites. Our team includes veterans who helped launch Waymo, scaled Segment to a $3.2B acquisition, and grew Uber Freight to $5B in revenue. We retrofit the heavy equipment contractors already own, starting with excavators, so experienced crews can safely take on more projects and deliver more of the critical infrastructure our society needs. In August 2026, Bedrock-equipped excavators began doing fully autonomous, paid work on live commercial job sites. We've more than doubled our customer base since 2025, and our machines now work with contractors across the South, Midwest, and Mid-Atlantic In October 2026, we raised a $600M Series C co-led by CapitalG and Emergence Capital, bringing our total funding to nearly $1B. We're using it to put more autonomous machines to work, build the field and operations teams behind every deployment, and expand into new machine types and job-site tasks. This is where algorithms meet steel-toed boots. You'll work alongside construction veterans and world-class engineers to solve physical-world problems that simulations can't touch. If you're ready to do meaningful work on hard problems, we'd love to have you join us. We are seeking a Head of Validation and Verification Engineering to lead validation, and verification. In this role, you will define the criteria for every unsupervised deployment and serve as the technical authority on readiness, participating in critical launch decisions. You will develop a validation architecture where adding a new machine or capability is an incremental, evidence-based process. Rather than inheriting old frameworks, you will leverage cutting-edge research and create new best practices for an emerging industry. Our machines already operate unsupervised at customer sites. Everything ahead—introducing more machine types, tackling new tasks each quarter, expanding to new sites—pushes the boundaries of the safety standards that have brought us this far. What you will own Safety validation of the system. Design the metrics, scenario libraries, and architectural coverage that quantify end-to-end behavioral safety — and make them hold up as the machine set and task set expand. A validation architecture that generalizes. Decide what evidence is platform-independent and what must be re-established per machine, per task, per site. Turn the safety case into something composable instead of something rewritten. Systems engineering. Own requirements decomposition and traceability from mission-level intent through subsystems, and use validation findings to expose the gaps, ambiguities, and conflicts that feed back into design. V&V strategy and infrastructure. Choose the right instrument for each claim — log playback, closed-loop physics simulation, structured proving-ground testing, or on-site work — and specify the tooling and sim capability needed to make those instruments trustworthy across a growing fleet. Hardware and functional safety. Validate the sensing, compute, and actuation kit we install on customer machines, including functional-safety readiness of safety-critical paths, as that kit is ported onto new platforms. The org. Grow a team of software, systems, test, and hardware engineers plus data scientists, and scale it ahead of the machine count rather than behind it. Decision-grade reporting. Define the KPIs — verification coverage, defect trends, release readiness, system maturity — and turn dense test data into the small number of charts that let leadership, customers, and insurers make a call. What the first year looks like A V&V framework and safety case structure that spans multiple machine types and an expanding task set, and that engineering, customers, and insurers all recognize as rigorous. A scenario and coverage model built for the machines and tasks we have not shipped yet, not just the ones we have. Readiness criteria that generalize — so the