What are the responsibilities and job description for the Functional Safety Manager position at APN Consulting Inc?
Job Title: Functional Safety Manager
Location: Southfield, MI 48076
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 a 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
Competency Area | Expected Depth | Illustrative Evidence |
ISO 26262 Parts 4, 5, and 6 | Expert | Has led or assured system, hardware, and software safety work products across a production program. |
Functional Safety Management | Advanced | Owned safety plan, interfaces, governance, milestones, confirmation measures, and escalations. |
Safety Requirements and Architecture | Expert | Converted safety concepts into allocated technical, hardware, and software safety requirements and mechanisms. |
Safety Analysis | Advanced | Led or reviewed FMEA, FTA, FMEDA, DFA, and ASIL decomposition/independence considerations. |
Verification and Validation | Advanced | Defined safety verification strategy, acceptance criteria, traceability, and evidence across integration levels. |
Automotive Embedded Systems | Advanced | Understands ECUs, microcontrollers, sensors, actuators, networks, diagnostics, real-time software, and interfaces. |
ALM and Configuration Control | Advanced | Uses requirements, test, defect, baseline, and change-management tools to maintain a defensible digital thread. |
Leadership and Stakeholder Management | Expert | Drives decisions across organizational and supplier boundaries while maintaining objective safety assurance. |
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.