Senior Verification & Validation (V&V) Engineer - San Francisco
About the role
Overview
Polymath Robotics is creating software that can safely control all of the world's industrial vehicles, and we're looking for a Senior V&V Engineer to join our team. We're a small, close-knit group of roughly 20 people, each of us experts in our fields, working to bring autonomous vehicles to mining, agriculture, defense, and other industries quickly. We believe robotics and autonomy are at a tipping point, similar to how the PC industry reshaped the world in the 80s, and we need your help. Founded by Stefan Seltz-Axmacher (Founder of Starsky Robotics) and Ilia Baranov (Clearpath Robotics, Amazon Astro), we're building the autonomy stack we wish we had at our previous companies.
As our Senior V&V Engineer, you'll own how we prove our autonomy stack is ready — from simulation to lab to field. You'll author the test plans, acceptance criteria, and integrator handoff procedures that turn engineering work into accepted, paid milestones across every vehicle we deliver.
Responsibilities
- Own verification and validation architecture across the autonomy stack — author field test plans, simulation test cases, and acceptance test suites that scale across every vehicle of a given model.
- Write Integrator Acceptance Tests (IATs) — the structured procedures handed to integration partners to run before vehicles are delivered to Polymath.
- Define acceptance criteria and exit gates for each contract milestone, in close collaboration with engineering and program leads.
- Participate in design reviews to catch defects before they reach hardware — shift-left quality is the cheapest quality.
- Build test frameworks and plans that scale — write once, run many, with procedures clear enough that any trained executor produces reliable results.
- Perform hands-on testing for high-risk or novel functionality where engineering judgment is the bar.
