Autonomous-Driving Scenario Intelligence Leader

The mandate

The scenario-intelligence seat became vacant after a pre-assessment rehearsal showed that thousands of parameter variations had been counted as independent safety coverage while several high-consequence interactions at the edge of the operational design domain had no representative test. The former leader departed by mutual agreement, and simulation, fleet mining and safety-case teams now use conflicting scenario identities and cannot trace an assurance claim back to source evidence.

The interim must mobilise within three weeks and hold the executive seat for fifteen months. Search for a permanent director begins in month eight once an external assessor has accepted the coverage basis for controlled review; six weeks of shared authority are reserved for induction, and the mandate concludes at month fifteen even if a later vehicle programme changes its launch sequence.

Handover is complete when every claimed operational-design-domain hazard maps to a versioned logical scenario, justified parameter distribution, executable concrete tests and reconciled simulation, track or fleet results. Coverage inflation from duplicates must be removed, three seasonal data cycles must operate under one configuration baseline, and the successor must defend a sampled evidence chain and sign the remaining coverage-debt register before the safety committee.

The interim may approve the scenario ontology, reject invalid coverage claims, prioritise fleet collection, suspend an evidence pipeline, reset team accountabilities and commit up to €12 million of the authorised remediation budget to temporary tooling or specialist tests. Committee approval is needed for residual-risk acceptance, formal assessor submissions, budget beyond that limit and changes to the stated design domain; permanent appointments, vehicle launch approval and public safety claims remain outside the interim’s authority.

Control-law development, sensor hardware selection, vehicle industrialisation and the company-wide homologation calendar are excluded from the assignment. The leader will demand interfaces and evidence from those owners but will not tune driving policy, negotiate production supply, replace the central safety-management system or absorb feature-validation work unrelated to scenario completeness and representativeness.

Why this seat is open

The failed rehearsal revealed that scenario volume had become a proxy for evidence quality and that no executive owned the chain from real-world hazard to reproducible test. Promoting one of the current discipline heads would preserve the boundary disputes between simulation, fleet data and functional safety at the moment those boundaries must be redrawn. The board requires independent temporary authority while it recruits a successor able to inherit an assessor-ready system.

What you will own

• Reconcile operational-design-domain hazards, unsafe control actions and known field precursors into a governed scenario taxonomy with durable identifiers and version lineage.
• Decide which parameter variations add meaningful exposure and retire duplicates that inflate counts without testing a distinct behavioural or environmental boundary.
• Establish coverage arguments across frequency, severity, interaction complexity, uncertainty and controllability instead of relying on distance driven or scenario totals.
• Direct mining of fleet logs, incident reports and synthetic perturbations toward missing pedestrian, weather, work-zone, occlusion and heavy-vehicle interaction evidence.
• Correlate simulation behaviour with proving-ground and monitored-fleet results, investigating domain gaps before a virtual result enters the safety case.
• Institute configuration control linking software build, map, sensor model, traffic-agent behaviour, random seed and pass criterion to every retained execution result.
• Transfer the assessor narrative, rejected claims, coverage debt and next-season collection plan through a successor-led evidence defence observed by the committee.

Candidate qualifications

• Held director or executive authority for scenario-based verification, simulation assurance or safety evidence in an automated-driving programme approaching external assessment.
• Rebuilt a scenario catalogue whose apparent scale concealed duplicates, weak traceability or operational-design-domain gaps and can evidence the corrected coverage argument.
• Connected systems-theoretic hazards or comparable safety analysis to logical scenarios, parameter distributions, concrete tests and configuration-controlled outcomes.
• Demonstrated simulation credibility against track and fleet observations, including investigation of material domain mismatch rather than simple aggregate correlation.
• Defended autonomous-system evidence before an independent assessor, technical service or board safety committee and changed claims when support was insufficient.
• Led multidisciplinary recovery across fleet data, simulation, safety, test operations and tooling before transferring authority to a permanent successor.

Non-negotiables

• Can begin within three weeks, work primarily in Munich and sustain monthly Stuttgart plus quarterly Sweden or Austria travel throughout the fifteen-month term.
• Will remove unsupported coverage claims and delay an evidence submission when traceability or representativeness fails, regardless of programme timing.
• Has personally governed scenario evidence for automated vehicles in a defined operational design domain; generic automotive test management does not qualify.
• Holds no undisclosed remuneration or contingent arrangement with the assessment body, simulation vendor, data supplier or testing partner in scope.

1. 49 words maximum. State your availability for Munich, earliest start and constraints on the required proving-ground and seasonal-test travel.
2. 49 words maximum. Describe a scenario-coverage claim you rejected, how you exposed duplication or missing ODD evidence and what replaced it.
3. 49 words maximum. How have you demonstrated that a simulation result remained credible when compared with track or fleet behaviour at a safety-relevant boundary?