Member of Technical Staff - Robot Simulation

Machenta; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 85,000 - 120,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Private health insurance

Free meals

Job summary

Machenta Ltd. is seeking a Member of Technical Staff to advance robotics simulation.

You will design diverse environments and task suites, own benchmarking for instant robot learning, and push speed and fidelity of simulators. The role collaborates across the company to ensure simulation reflects real-world behaviors.

Qualifications

• Hands-on experience building robotics simulation environments with physics engines such as Isaac Sim/Lab or MuJoCo.
• Strong understanding of rigid-body dynamics, contact modelling and numerical integration.
• Strong Python skills and experience writing performance-critical code.
• Experience optimising simulation performance, e.g. GPU parallelisation or vectorised environments.
• Rigorous evaluation and benchmarking: designing tasks and metrics that measure what actually matters.
• Clear communication of ideas and findings to the team.

Responsibilities

• Design and build diverse simulation environments and task suites for training and evaluating robot policies.
• Own the simulation benchmarking and evaluation stack for instant robot learning, ensuring a reliable progress picture.
• Optimise simulator speed and fidelity, including large-scale GPU-parallelised simulation.
• Lead simulation of deformable objects and complex, contact-rich dynamics like cloth, cables and soft bodies.
• Build tooling for procedural generation of scenes, assets and tasks at scale.

Skills

Robotics simulation

Python

Performance optimisation

GPU parallelisation

Benchmarking design

Effective communication

Tools

Isaac Sim/Lab

MuJoCo

Job description

About the Company

We've been building Machenta for less than a year, and so we're still right at the beginning here. We’re a very close team, sharing the journey together, working in person in London, and collaborating throughout. This has been great fun! And as we bring in the next few team members, we're now thinking carefully about what roles we need, and who we should be speaking with. Everybody joining will be Machenta’s expert in their part of the team, with ownership and responsibility for shaping where we go next and how we get there. We pay well, and we'll be giving you meaningful equity, private health insurance, and lots of free food.

About the Role

As a Member of Technical Staff working on simulation, you’ll build the worlds our robots learn and are tested in. You’ll design diverse environments and task suites, own the benchmarking stack we use to measure progress in instant robot learning, and make our simulators faster and more faithful to reality. You’ll also take on some of the hardest problems in simulation, from deformable objects like cloth and cables to complex, contact-rich dynamics. It’s a highly hands‑on, collaborative role: what you build will shape how every model at Machenta is trained and evaluated, and you’ll work closely with everyone across the company to make sure simulation tells us something true about the real world. If you enjoy building systems that others rely on every day, you’ll find this work very rewarding.

In This Role You Will:

• Design and build diverse simulation environments and task suites for training and evaluating robot policies.

• Own the simulation benchmarking and evaluation stack for instant robot learning, making sure it gives a reliable picture of progress.

• Optimise simulator speed and fidelity, including large-scale, GPU-parallelised simulation.

• Lead our simulation of deformable objects and complex, contact-rich dynamics, such as cloth, cables and soft bodies.

• Build tooling for procedural generation of scenes, assets and tasks at scale.

What We Hope You’ll Bring:

• Hands‑on experience building robotics simulation environments with physics engines such as Isaac Sim/Lab or MuJoCo.

• A strong understanding of rigid‑body dynamics, contact modelling and numerical integration, and how they affect simulation accuracy and stability.

• Strong Python skills, and experience writing performance‑critical code.

• Experience optimising simulation performance, for example through GPU parallelisation, profiling or vectorised environments.

• A rigorous approach to evaluation and benchmarking: designing tasks and metrics that measure what actually matters.

• Clear communication of your ideas and findings to the team.

Bonus Points If You Have:

• Experience simulating deformable objects, such as cloth, cables or soft bodies, using methods like FEM, position‑based dynamics or MPM.

• Experience with sim-to-real transfer, including domain randomisation or system identification.

• Experience with GPU programming, such as CUDA, Warp or JAX.

• Experience with procedural content generation, 3D asset pipelines or photorealistic rendering.

• Experience training or evaluating robot learning policies in simulation.

• A PhD in a relevant field.

• Experience at an early‑stage robotics or AI company.

Joining Us

We're setting off to change how robots learn, and how people interact with them. If you're excited about joining in on the adventure with us all, and about working in a close‑knit, highly ambitious, highly passionate team in the heart of King's Cross London, we would love to hear from you!