PhD - Safety Contracts for Physical AI

In this role you will design and develop safety contracts for autonomous systems, linking decision-making with control to ensure safe operation. You will define formal assumptions, guarantees, and adaptation rules to secure modular autonomy across abstraction levels. You will apply optimization, control, and machine learning methods to create robust, high-performance solutions and derive feasibility margins from real-world data. You will translate research into practical vehicle motion control applications and contribute to safe, learning-enabled autonomy with runtime verification. This position offers a chance to influence safety-led innovation within autonomous driving at Bosch, with a PhD

• Design and develop safety contracts for autonomous systems to ensure safe interaction between decision-making and control
• Define assumptions, guarantees, and adaptation rules for modular autonomy stacks
• Apply optimal control, sequential decision-making under uncertainty, and reinforcement learning
• Derive feasibility margins and safety contracts from real-world data using machine learning
• Translate research findings into vehicle motion control applications
• Contribute to modular, safety-by-design learning-enabled autonomy with runtime verification

• Master in Control Engineering, Robotics, Computer Science or related field
• Strong background in optimization or control
• Programming proficiency in Python
• Enthusiasm for technical challenges and interdisciplinary collaboration
• Ability to work systematically and deliver high-quality results
• Very good English; German is a plus

• enthusiastic about technical challenges
• works well in interdisciplinary teams
• takes initiative and responsibility
• optimization
• control
• Python