Staff Simulation Engineer - Cloud-Scale Robotics Platform

Apptronik; Austin (TX); On-site; USD 260,000 - 290,000; Full time

Job summary

Apptronik is hiring a Staff Simulation Engineer to advance the Core Simulation Platform for robotic systems, with emphasis on high-performance C++ and Python, and scalable cloud pipelines. The role targets development parallelism, accurate digital twins, and robust policy training workflows.

You will collaborate with Controls, AI Research, and Perception teams to push simulation capabilities forward, enabling faster iteration and safer, more reliable robotics as we scale Apollo-like systems in

Qualifications

• Excellent C++ and/or Python programming skills.
• Familiar with software development best practices: CI/CD, automated testing, and code quality standards.
• Understanding of robotics concepts: kinematics, dynamics, controls, system identification.
• Experience with modern robotic simulators (Isaac Gym/Lab, MuJoCo, or equivalent).
• Understanding of Reinforcement Learning and VLAs, with research or production experience.
• Experience with large-scale training workloads — deploying parallel simulations on cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) with distributed computing frameworks (e.g., Ray, Kubernetes).

Responsibilities

• Contribute to the architecture and development of the core simulation platform — high-performance digital twins that serve as the foundation for policy training, controls validation, and CI/CD integration testing.
• Help build and scale cloud-native simulation pipelines capable of generating millions of experience hours per day, parallelizing physics and rendering for rapid policy iteration.
• Improve sim-to-real transfer through advanced contact models and actuator dynamics that help policies trained in simulation transfer to physical humanoid hardware.
• Develop sensor-realistic environments (camera, LiDAR, depth) that challenge the perception stack with dynamic and diverse worlds.
• Ship platform improvements that visibly reduce iteration time for RL, controls, and perception teams.
• Work with Controls, AI Research, and Perception teams to support their evolving simulation needs as the platform grows.

Skills

C++/Python

CI/CD

Robotics concepts

Robot simulators

RL/VLAs

Cloud training

Education

Master's or PhD in CS/Robotics/EE

Equivalent experience

Job description

Apptronik is hiring a Staff Simulation Engineer to advance the Core Simulation Platform for robotic systems, with emphasis on high-performance C++ and Python, and scalable cloud pipelines. The role targets development parallelism, accurate digital twins, and robust policy training workflows.

You will collaborate with Controls, AI Research, and Perception teams to push simulation capabilities forward, enabling faster iteration and safer, more reliable robotics as we scale Apollo-like systems in