Simulation Environments Engineer

Department: Research

Location: San Francisco

Compensation: $230K – $385K • Offers Equity

Employment Type: FullTime

About the Team

Our Robotics team is focused on unlocking general-purpose robotics and pushing towards AGI-level intelligence in dynamic, real-world settings. Working across the entire model stack, we integrate cutting-edge hardware and software to explore a broad range of robotic form factors. We strive to seamlessly blend high-level AI capabilities with the constraints of physical systems to improve peoples’ lives.

About the Role

We are hiring a Simulation Environments Engineer to build the tooling and infrastructure that enable high-coverage, realistic virtual environments for robotics research and evaluation. This role is focused on creating the systems (not necessarily hand-crafting every asset) that let researchers and engineers describe, visualize, generate, and validate task environments at scale. You will design pipelines for importing and vetting 3rd-party content, author procedural and randomized scenario generators, and ship ergonomic tools that make environment creation fast, repeatable, and testable. This role sits at the intersection of game-engine practice, asset engineering, and large-scale simulation infrastructure.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA, and requires in-person 3 days a week.

In this role, you will:

• Build interactive and programmatic tooling to describe, preview, and validate scenes and tasks so researchers can author scenarios quickly and repeatedly.

• Create content pipelines to curate, convert, optimize and quality-check assets (visual + collision) from third-party collections and internal sources; define standards so assets behave predictably across engines and tasks.

• Implement robust importers and adapters that bring environments and setups from Isaac/Unity/Unreal/Omniverse/other repos into our sim pipelines while preserving fidelity and ensuring performance.

• Build frameworks for procedural generation and controlled randomization (visual, physical, kinematic) so models see a systematic, measurable variety of conditions.

• Define and enforce quality gates for environments (visual fidelity, collision correctness, physical plausibility) and instrument validation tooling so environments meet realism/coverage goals.

• Connect environment tooling to CI/CD, presubmit checks, large-scale simulation farms and model-eval pipelines so environments can be tested automatically and run at scale. (You’ll partner with sim-pipelines and sim-realism owners.)

• Create processes and templates to onboard new object libraries and contracted asset work; provide clear acceptance tests and automation for vendor deliverables.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Enjoy building ergonomic tooling that empowers other engineers and researchers to produce high-quality environments quickly.

• Have practical experience with modern world engines (NVIDIA Isaac Sim, Unity, Unreal Engine, Omniverse) or equivalent production pipelines and can choose and integrate the right platform for each use case.

• Are comfortable with the full content pipeline: CAD/asset import, USD/GLTF/FBX/texture workflows, collision mesh generation, LODs, and material/physics metadata.

• Have built or used procedural generation and domain randomization systems to produce broad, task-relevant variability.

• Care about quality control and validation — you like to design automated checks and visual/quantitative diagnostics that ensure environments are correct and performant.

• Can collaborate across functions — you’ll work closely with researchers, physics/realism engineers, SWE/RE, and vendors to ensure environments are both realistic and actionable for ML training and evaluation.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity. 

We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.

For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.

Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.

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