Senior Safety Engineer in Bristol

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Department: Engineering

Employment Type: Permanent - Full Time

Location: Bristol, UK

Reporting To: Josie Anderson

Compensation: GBP 55,000 - GBP 70,000 / year

We're building the UK's next generation engineering powerhouse, providing critical technology that strengthens national security and resilience. At Rowden, we design and integrate advanced systems that sense, connect, and protect data in challenging environments where quick decisions are vital. Our solutions use intelligent automation to enhance speed and efficiency and are built to be reliable and straightforward for critical operations in remote or high-pressure settings. Headquartered in Bristol (UK), we combine modern engineering methods with cutting-edge commercial technology to create adaptable, mission-critical systems. We focus on solving the tough challenges that others overlook, ensuring our customers can operate effectively in an ever-changing world.

About the role

Rowden is growing its safety engineering capability, and we're looking for an experienced Senior Safety Engineer to play a leading role across the full project life cycle. From requirements engineering and system architecture through to integration, verification and validation, you'll provide trusted safety engineering expertise on complex, mission-critical systems. This is a senior, hands-on role with real influence: shaping safety strategy, mentoring others, and helping to continuously improve Rowden's safety engineering practices as the business scales.

Key areas of responsibility

• Lead safety engineering work packages - planning, managing, and delivering safety activities using appropriate tools (e.g. JIRA).
• Define and implement safety strategy and methodology, identifying safety deliverables and milestones using recognised techniques such as FMEA, HAZOP and BowTie.
• Provide technical domain expertise, contributing to architectural evaluations, trade studies and technical feasibility analysis.
• Develop and implement safety delivery strategies aligned to project and customer needs.
• Produce and maintain high-quality safety documentation, using best-practice tools and methods.
• Manage relationships and interfaces with internal teams, suppliers, and customers.
• Support and refine Rowden's safety engineering processes to ensure efficient, robust delivery.
• Coach and mentor junior engineers, raising safety and systems engineering awareness across the organisation.
• Present project progress at key programme reviews and to customers.
• Author safety artefacts, including hazard logs, declarations of conformance, and requirement verification and acceptance arguments.
• Engage with suppliers alongside project management.
• Stay current with industry best practice, sharing knowledge within the safety and systems engineering community at Rowden.

Key skills, experience and behaviours

What you'll bring

• You'll be a confident and proactive safety engineer with strong technical judgement and excellent communication skills.
• Proven experience in safety requirements elicitation, including generation of derived safety requirements.
• A thorough understanding of safety engineering lifecycles and how to tailor them to different system types.
• Practical experience in hazard identification and analysis, with a clear understanding of the strengths and limitations of different approaches.
• The ability to conduct and justify trade-off analyses to a wide range of stakeholders.
• Strong skills in designing, producing, and critically reviewing safety documentation.
• Knowledge of engineering standards, safety and environmental regulations, and contractual obligations.
• Excellent report writing and presentation skills.
• The ability to work autonomously, managing multiple priorities at once.
• Experience in planning, delegation, and dependency management within engineering teams.
• A collaborative mindset and enjoyment of working in cross-functional teams.
• A strong analytical approach, with the ability to explain complex concepts clearly.
• Knowledge of Government engineering and procurement environments.

About you

We're looking for someone who is passionate about ensuring the equipment we deliver to frontline users is safe and reliable. While you'll gain plenty of experience in this role, you should already have:

• A pragmatic and common-sense approach.
• A customer- and user-focused mindset with excellent communication skills.
• A desire to learn continuously and develop across multiple assurance domains, flexible to business-needs.
• The confidence working independently as well as part of a team.
• The confidence to ask questions and challenge when appropriate.

Working at Rowden

We are committed to building a flexible, inclusive, and enabling company. Our aim is to create a diverse team of talented people with unique skills, experience, and backgrounds, so please apply and come as you are! We also recognise the importance of flexible working and support this wherever we can. We typically operate a flexible, hybrid-working model, with an average 3 days in the office each week (dependent on the role). We welcome the opportunity to discuss flexibility, part-time working requirements and/or workplace adjustments with all our applicants. Rowden is a Disability Confident Committed company, and we actively encourage people with disabilities and health conditions to apply for our roles. Please let us know your requirements early on so that we can make sure you have everything you need up front to help make the recruitment process and experience as easy as possible. Finally, if you feel that you don't meet all the criteria included above but have transferable skills and relevant experience, we'd still love to hear from you!