Robotics Simulation Engineer - Digital Twin & CI/CD

persona.ai; Town of Texas (WI); On-site; USD 90,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

persona.ai is seeking a Simulation Engineer to own and expand our NVIDIA Isaac Sim and Omniverse simulation infrastructure for autonomous robotics. You will build digital twins, sim assets, and CI/CD pipelines used daily by the autonomy team.

You will report to the Behavior Coordination Lead and collaborate with ML, locomotion, perception, and DevOps teams to prototype, test, and validate robot behaviors in simulation before hardware deployment.

Qualifications

• BS, MS, or PhD in Robotics, Computer Science, Mechanical Engineering, or a related field.
• 3+ years of professional experience in robotics simulation, digital twin development, or physics-based simulation environments.
• Strong hands-on experience with NVIDIA Isaac Sim and/or NVIDIA Omniverse.
• Working knowledge of OpenUSD (Universal Scene Description): authoring, composition, referencing, flattening, and debugging USD stage hierarchies.
• Proficiency in Python; comfortable writing simulation tooling, test harnesses, and automation scripts.
• Experience with at least one physics engine: PhysX, MuJoCo, Bullet, or Drake.
• Solid understanding of robot kinematics, dynamics, and articulated body simulation.
• Experience developing or maintaining CI/CD pipelines for simulation or robotics software.
• Familiarity with containerization (Docker) and DevOps practices for simulation infrastructure.
• Ability to create and manage 3D simulation assets (meshes, materials, collision geometry, articulation definitions).

Responsibilities

• Build, maintain, and extend simulation environments in NVIDIA Isaac Sim and Omniverse for humanoid robot development.
• Develop and manage OpenUSD sim assets: robot models, tools, workpieces, customer facility environments (shipyards, steel fabrication plants, industrial sites).
• Create and maintain physics-accurate digital twins of customer facilities (shipyards and industrial manufacturing) for behavior validation and deployment planning.
• Integrate all autonomy subsystems (locomotion, manipulation, perception, hands, navigation, welding) to run against Isaac Sim.
• Design and implement behavior-level CI/CD pipelines that automatically validate robot behaviors in simulation.
• Prototype and mock-test robot behaviors (welding, navigation, manipulation) in simulation before hardware integration.
• Develop synthetic data generation pipelines for training perception, manipulation, and navigation models.

Skills

NVIDIA Isaac Sim

NVIDIA Omniverse

Python

OpenUSD

CI/CD pipelines

ROS 2

Docker

Unreal Engine

3D simulation assets

Kinematics & dynamics

Education

BS/MS/PhD in Robotics or related

Tools

Gazebo

PhysX

MuJoCo

Bullet

Drake

Kit SDK

Job description

persona.ai is seeking a Simulation Engineer to own and expand our NVIDIA Isaac Sim and Omniverse simulation infrastructure for autonomous robotics. You will build digital twins, sim assets, and CI/CD pipelines used daily by the autonomy team.

You will report to the Behavior Coordination Lead and collaborate with ML, locomotion, perception, and DevOps teams to prototype, test, and validate robot behaviors in simulation before hardware deployment.