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 autonomou