PhD - Safety Contracts for Physical AI

In this PhD-focused role at Bosch, you design and validate safety contracts for autonomous systems, ensuring safe interaction between decision-making and control. You will define assumptions, guarantees, and adaptation rules across modular autonomy stacks to preserve system integrity. Leveraging optimization, advanced control, and learning, you translate research into practical vehicle motion control solutions and enable runtime verification. You will contribute to learning-enabled autonomy by design and drive safe, high-performance outcomes.

• 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 across abstraction levels
• Apply optimal control, sequential decision-making under uncertainty, and reinforcement learning to build robust solutions
• Derive feasibility margins, uncertainties, and safety contracts from real-world data using machine learning
• Translate research findings into concrete applications in vehicle motion control and autonomous driving
• Contribute to making learning-enabled autonomy modular by design and enable verification at runtime

• Master in Control Engineering, Robotics, Computer Science, or a related field
• solid background in optimization or control
• programming proficiency in Python
• excellent English; German is an advantage
• ability to work in interdisciplinary, diverse teams and take initiative
• systematic, solution-focused mindset with high-quality delivery

• enthusiasm for technical challenges
• initiative and responsibility
• systematic and methodical task approach
• optimization and control
• Python programming
• machine learning and reinforcement learning