Senior Research Engineer, Simulation

Description

The company is hiring a senior or principal engineer who specializes in physics simulation for the Generalist Embodied Agent Research (GEAR) group. The group leads Project GR00T, the company's long-term effort to build foundation models and full-stack technology for humanoid robots.

You will join a research team that publishes widely on multimodal foundation models, large-scale robot learning, embodied AI and physical simulation. Previous projects include Eureka, VIMA, Voyager, MineDojo, MimicPlay and Prismer. Your work will shape both research directions and product plans.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain simulation environments on top of frameworks such as MuJoCo and Isaac Lab for robotics research.
• Write and test control algorithms and XR teleoperation interfaces for simulated robots.
• Create procedural generation pipelines that produce varied environments, object layouts and robot motions.
• Tune the performance of GPU-based physics simulators for large training runs.
• Bring robot assets into USD format, configure them and check them, so that behaviour carries over from simulation to hardware.
• Build sim-to-real pipelines and deploy learned models onto physical robots.

Requirements

• A bachelor's degree or higher in computer science, robotics, engineering or a related field.
• At least 10 years of full-time industry experience in robotics, physics simulation or both.
• Proven work with one or more physics simulators, such as MuJoCo, Isaac Sim, PyBullet, Drake or Gazebo.
• Deep knowledge of current simulation methods, including accurate contact dynamics for manipulation and locomotion and photorealistic rendering for perception.
• Strong skill in generating simulation assets and task definitions and in building Gym-style APIs for neural network training.

Conditions

Optional: a master's or PhD in computer science, robotics, engineering or a related field.

Optional: experience on physics simulation at autonomous driving or humanoid robotics companies.

Optional: hands-on experience deploying and debugging neural network models on robot hardware.

Optional: expertise in reinforcement learning and neural network training.

Optional: proven tech lead experience, coordinating a team of robotics engineers and taking projects from concept to deployment.

Optional: contributions to popular open-source simulation frameworks or publications at top conferences such as ICRA, IROS, RSS or CoRL.

Base salary is set by location, experience and other objective job-related factors, within a range of 224,000 USD to 356,500 USD.

Applications are accepted until at least November 3, 2026. The role fills an existing vacancy. The company uses AI tools in recruiting.

The company is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on protected characteristics.