Being spoilt for choices
I am currently working as a Senior Engineer for Functional Safety at Continental Engineering Services (CES) in Frankfurt, Germany. Before joining Continental’s development and production service provider, I studied physics and obtained my PhD in experimental atomic physics at Frankfurt University.
Sometime before my studies came to an end, a former colleague and friend of mine wrote me a message. At that time he was working for CES and told me that they were looking for candidates. He kindly provided some background info on the vacant positions and also established the contact to my now later boss.
Not long after having handed in my application forms, I received the invitation to a job interview. This went pretty well, and I even had the chance to decide between two different fields of work (i.e., architecture or functional safety). As I did not have profound background knowledge in either one of them but the description of what “functional safety is about” sounded rather interesting to me, I opted for the opportunity to explore in this field. Functional Safety is a discipline which during the development of technical components in the automotive area ensures the exclusion of systematic faults as well as the detectability of random failures. Target is a safe operation for the end-user. All topics in this context are described by a dedicated international standard and are represented and tracked by a dedicated project team member.
Since then, I appreciate working in this field for CES with its open and pleasant atmosphere among the colleagues, flat hierarchies in the company and a wide range of various exceptional projects with different technical challenges in different areas (e.g. automotive, motorbike or off-highway applications).
