Simulation Environments Engineer, Robotics
Job Description
About the Team
Our Robotics team is focused on unlocking general-purpose robotics and pushing towards AGI-level intelligence in dynamic, real-world settings. Working across the entire model stack, we integrate cutting-edge hardware and software to explore a broad range of robotic form factors. We strive to seamlessly blend high-level AI capabilities with the constraints of physical systems to improve peoples’ lives.
About the Role
We are seeking a Software Engineer to lead our simulation environments initiative, setting the vision for scaling our virtual environments in coverage, realism, and throughput. In this role, you will harness modern game development practices to leverage and extend industry-leading platforms such as NVIDIA Isaac Sim, Unity, or Unreal Engine to design and deliver synthetic environments that are dynamic, richly interactive, and photorealistic. You will build scalable content pipelines that enable rapid creation of diverse simulation scenarios within these synthetic environments that will allow our research teams to push the boundaries of robotics training and validation.
Your mission will be to build these simulated environments and associated infrastructure from the ground up. You will be given a high degree of autonomy to do this work. You will select the platform, help source assets and will help build a team of in-house simulation experts. You will collaborate closely with experts across software, hardware, research, and operations to ensure our simulators capture the true complexity of physical interactions while remaining intuitive, extensible, and easy to integrate for other teams.
This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.
In this role, you will:
Design, build, and maintain a high-performance, scalable simulator integrations that meshes cleanly with our existing codebase and data pipelines.
Curate, convert, and quality-check open-source environment assets so they can be deployed at scale across our simulation farm.
Develop domain- and task-randomization frameworks that systematically expose models to diverse visual, physical, and kinematic conditions.
Lead proof-of-concept collaborations with external GPU-accelerated simulation vendors to benchmark new features and influence roadmap priorities.
Establish best practices for versioning, testing, and validating simulated scenarios against real-world benchmarks.
You might thrive in this role if you:
Enjoy plumbing every layer of a robotics simulation stack—from CAD import and asset optimization to real-time loading, contact dynamics and rendering.
Keep current with advances in physics engines, differentiable simulation, and synthetic-data generation for robot learning.
Have led projects that bridge simulation and robotics, including teleoperation or hardware-in-the-loop testing.
Find satisfaction in building ergonomic tools, templates, and documentation that empower dozens of engineers and researchers to author new tasks quickly.
Have hands-on experience optimizing GPU pipelines, distributed compute jobs, or large-scale reinforcement-learning workloads.
Have experience building NVIDIA Isaac sim environments or environments in other open source world simulation engines.
Want to build creative tasks to challenge cutting edge large action models.
About OpenAI
OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity.
We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.
For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.
Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with applicable law, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.
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