High Performance Engineer (up to £140k)

Dex; Cambridge; On-site; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Dex in Cambridge, UK is seeking an elite senior individual contributor to own the performance of the full simulation and edge runtime stack for robotic systems.

You will tackle high-throughput GPU physics, mentor early-career engineers through pairing and design reviews, and collaborate with the founders to push code that runs on real robots in the lab.

The on-site role offers broad autonomy and a chance to shape the architecture of next-gen robotic software with a tight-knit engineering team.

Qualifications

• Proven production systems experience delivering measurable speedups.
• Background in high-throughput/low-latency domains (graphics, HPC, real-time systems).
• Proven ability to lift engineering teams through pairing and code reviews.
• On-site Cambridge, UK; collaboration with founders and robotics hardware.

Responsibilities

• Profile, diagnose, and optimize high-throughput GPU physics simulation and edge runtimes.
• Refactor critical paths to maximize hardware utilization, focusing on memory layout and SIMD.
• Deploy and validate real-time execution pipelines on physical robots in the lab.
• Mentor early-career engineers through pairing, reviews, and task decomposition.
• Collaborate with founders to review architecture and push simulation performance.

Skills

Modern C++ mastery

Hardware-aware parallelism

Profiling and optimization

Cache-conscious memory layout

Mentoring and pairing

Job description

The role

Robots train inside simulation, and execution speed is the entire product. Founded by veterans who spent over a decade building industry-standard GPU physics engines at the world's leading hardware firm, this team is building the end-to-end physics, training, and real-time edge runtime stack for the next generation of physical robotics. They are backed by top-tier venture capital with a multi-year runway, working as a tight-knit engineering team in Cambridge alongside quadruped and humanoid hardware. You will own performance across the entire simulation and edge runtime stack, finding where cycles disappear and taking them back. This is an elite senior individual contributor role, not a middle-management seat. You will sit alongside founders who still write engine code every day, serving as the senior technical anchor in the room to unblock and mentor a talented early-career team while pushing code that runs on real robots.

The work

• Profile, diagnose, and optimize high-throughput GPU physics simulation, policy learning pipelines, and edge execution runtimes.
• Refactor critical paths to maximize hardware utilization, tackling memory layout, cache misses, SIMD utilization, and multi-threaded synchronization.
• Deploy and validate real-time execution pipelines directly on physical humanoid and quadruped robots operating in the lab.
• Set the standard for code quality and systems engineering by mentoring early-career engineers through pairing, design reviews, and clear task decomposition.
• Collaborate directly with hands‑on technical founders to debate architecture, test hypotheses, and push raw simulation performance.

What You Bring

• Deep mastery of modern C++ with proven experience making production systems measurably faster through hardware‑aware parallelism, profiling, and cache‑conscious memory layout.
• A background in domains where throughput or latency is the product itself, such as physics simulation, game engines, HPC, low‑latency trading, or real‑time embedded systems.
• Demonstrated experience lifting the technical bar of an engineering team through direct pairing, actionable code reviews, and structured task breakdown.
• Ability to work fully on site in Cambridge, UK alongside the founders, team, and physical robot hardware.