Technical Product Manager - Safety & Compliance

Career Area:

Technology, Digital and Data

Job Description:

Your Work Shapes the World at Caterpillar Inc.

When you join Caterpillar, you're joining a global team who cares not just about the work we do – but also about each other.  We are the makers, problem solvers, and future world builders who are creating stronger, more sustainable communities. We don't just talk about progress and innovation here – we make it happen, with our customers, where we work and live. Together, we are building a better world, so we can all enjoy living in it.

Help Build the Future of Caterpillar

At Caterpillar, technology always has a purpose, which is to solve our customers’ toughest challenges. Through Cat Technology, we are solving problems by building the intelligence layer that connects machines, data, and people to make jobsites safer, more productive, and more sustainable. By combining deep domain expertise in physical systems with software, connectivity, autonomy, and AI, we deliver solutions that work in the real world—on real jobsites, at global scale. 

You’ll build and deploy against one of the most unique data foundations—over 1.6 million connected assets generating real-world data daily.  These data and platform capabilities are enabling the development of AI models, edge computing architectures, and software systems that scale across fleets, products, and industries. The result will be a new generation of machines that continuously learn, improve, and deliver performance at scale.

Job Summary: 

The Technical Product Manager - Safety & Regulatory Compliance is responsible for defining and executing the product strategy, roadmap, requirements, and governance framework that enable autonomous, semi-autonomous, and remote-controlled construction machines to be developed, validated, deployed, and operated safely and in compliance with applicable regulatory and industry requirements. This role owns the product-level safety and compliance portfolio across the machine, autonomy system, remote-control system, supporting infrastructure, and operational environment, including safety requirements, functional safety, hazard and risk management, safety cases, regulatory readiness, compliance traceability, and certification support. 

The role translates safety, regulatory, and operational risk into prioritized product capabilities and measurable acceptance criteria. It partners across Product Management, Technical Product Management, Systems Engineering, Functional Safety, Autonomy/Robotics, Machine Controls, Remote Operations, Cybersecurity, Validation, Quality, Legal/Regulatory, Architecture, and customer/site teams to ensure safety is engineered as an end-to-end system property rather than treated as a final compliance activity for autonomous and remote-controlled construction machines. 

What You Will Do: 

• Own and prioritize the Safety & Regulatory Compliance product backlog based on customer and business value, safety objectives, hazard severity, risk reduction, regulatory obligations, and program maturity. 
• Define the safety and compliance product roadmap for autonomous, semi-autonomous, and remote-controlled construction machine capabilities from proof of concept through production deployment and lifecycle support. 
• Partner with the Safety & Regulations division to translate applicable standards, regulations, corporate policies, safety analyses, and operational constraints into product requirements, functional requirements, acceptance criteria, and release criteria for autonomous, semi-autonomous, and remote-controlled construction machines, while monitoring changes to applicable regulations and standard and assess product and roadmap impact. 
• Lead product-level safety planning and cross-functional hazard identification/risk-management activities, including system hazard analyses, machine-control safety analyses, operational risk assessments, and mitigation planning. 
• Partner with functional safety and engineering teams to define and maintain safety-related control functions, required performance levels, design constraints, verification expectations, and evidence needed to demonstrate that risk controls are implemented effectively. 
• Drive end-to-end traceability from hazards and regulatory obligations through safety requirements, architecture/design controls, software and hardware implementation, verification and validation, residual risk, and objective compliance evidence. 
• Define product-level safety readiness and compliance gates for demonstrations, pilots, releases, and production deployment, including clear go/no-go criteria, unresolved-risk disposition, exceptions, and escalation paths. 
• Partner with Cybersecurity and Systems Engineering to ensure safety-relevant security threats, data/communications dependencies, software updates, and connected-system failure modes are considered in the overall safety argument. 
• Build and maintain the product safety case/compliance evidence strategy and support audits, regulatory reviews, conformity assessments, certification activities, customer safety reviews, and deployment approvals. 
• Establish and monitor safety and compliance KPIs, including open safety risks, mitigation closure, verification coverage, safety requirement traceability, compliance evidence completeness, audit findings, and release readiness. 
• Communicate safety readiness, regulatory status, key risks, mitigation progress, certification milestones, and release constraints to technical teams, program leadership, customers, and other stakeholders. 

What You Will Have: 

Autonomy & Remote-Control Safety: Knowledge of safety principles for autonomous, semi-autonomous, and remote-controlled mobile machinery, including hazards introduced by machine decision-making, sensing/perception, localization, planning, control, communications, human-machine interaction, remote operator control, degraded operation, fallback, and safe-state behavior. 

Functional Safety & Safety Engineering: Working knowledge of functional-safety concepts, safety-related control systems, hazard analysis, risk assessment, safety integrity/performance requirements, verification, validation, and safety-case development for complex electromechanical and software-intensive systems. 

Regulatory & Standards Strategy: Ability to identify applicable regulations, standards, and market/site requirements; translate them into a product compliance strategy; manage applicability and interpretation with subject-matter experts; and maintain readiness as requirements evolve. 

Systems Thinking & Requirements Management: Ability to decompose product-level safety outcomes into system/subsystem requirements and maintain bidirectional traceability across hazards, requirements, architecture, implementation, tests, and compliance evidence. 

Risk Management: Ability to facilitate structured hazard identification, assess risk, prioritize mitigation, evaluate residual risk, and manage safety issues and change throughout the product lifecycle. 

Product Management: Ability to build and prioritize roadmaps/backlogs, make tradeoffs, define measurable outcomes, manage dependencies, and balance product value, delivery needs, technical feasibility, safety, and compliance. 

Cross-Functional Leadership & Communication: Ability to align engineering, safety, validation, legal/regulatory, operations, customers, and leadership around safety objectives, decisions, evidence, and release readiness without relying solely on direct authority. 

Consideration For Top Candidates: 

• 4+ years of experience spanning technical product management, autonomy/robotics, functional safety, systems engineering, machine controls, remote operations, safety engineering, regulatory compliance, or related technical leadership roles. 
• Demonstrated experience leading safety and compliance strategy from concept and requirements through product roadmap execution, validation, deployment, and lifecycle support. 
• Experience with autonomous or semi-autonomous mobile machinery and/or remote operator control systems in earth-moving, mining, construction, agriculture, industrial, automotive, or other safety-critical applications. 
• Working knowledge of standards relevant to the product domain, such as ISO 17757 for autonomous/semi-autonomous earth-moving and mining machine systems, ISO 15817 for remote operator control systems, the ISO 19014 functional-safety series for earth-moving machinery, ISO 12100 risk assessment principles, and other applicable regional or machine-specific requirements. 
• Experience facilitating or applying hazard analysis and risk assessment methods and converting identified risks into implementable safety requirements and validated mitigations. 
• Experience with functional-safety concepts for safety-related control systems, including performance requirements, architecture/hardware/software considerations, diagnostics, fault response, and verification evidence. 
• Experience defining safety requirements for behaviors such as emergency stop, controlled stop, obstacle/person detection, speed and motion limitations, geofencing/operating boundaries, control-mode transition, remote-control link loss, degraded operation, fallback, fault recovery, and safe-state behavior. 
• Experience building or contributing to safety cases, compliance matrices, requirements-to-test traceability, regulatory submissions, audits, certification activities, or formal release-readiness reviews. 
• Ability to work effectively with engineering, validation, functional safety, cybersecurity, legal/regulatory, quality, operations, customer/site teams, and senior leadership to resolve cross-domain safety issues and make risk-informed product decisions. 
• Strong written and verbal communication skills with the ability to explain complex safety and regulatory topics in product, engineering, executive, customer, and regulator-ready language. 

Additional Details:

• This position requires the candidate to work full-time at the Irving, TX office (Dallas)
• Domestic relocation assistance is available for this position.
• Visa sponsorship is NOT available with this position.

Summary Pay Range:

$128,470.00 - $208,770.00

Compensation and benefits offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, job level, market location, job-related knowledge, skills, individual performance and experience. Please note that salary is only one component of total compensation at Caterpillar. 

Benefits:

Subject to plan eligibility, terms, and guidelines. This is a summary list of benefits.

• Medical, dental, and vision benefits*

• Paid time off plan (Vacation, Holidays, Volunteer, etc.)*

• 401(k) savings plans*

• Health Savings Account (HSA)*

• Flexible Spending Accounts (FSAs)*

• Health Lifestyle Programs*

• Employee Assistance Program*

• Voluntary Benefits and Employee Discounts*

• Career Development*

• Incentive bonus*

• Disability benefits

• Life Insurance

• Parental leave

• Adoption benefits

• Tuition Reimbursement

* These benefits also apply to part-time employees

This position requires working onsite five days a week.Relocation is available for this position.Visa Sponsorship is not available for this position.

Posting Dates:

Any offer of employment is conditioned upon the successful completion of a drug screen.

Caterpillar is an Equal Opportunity Employer, Including Veterans and Individuals with Disabilities.  Qualified applicants of any age are encouraged to apply.

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