Senior 3D Simulation Pipeline Engineer

JOB SUMMARY

Apollo doesn’t get to do useful work until we can simulate every environment we want to deploy it in — and that pipeline is yours to build. As Senior Simulation Engineer for Scan2Sim & Asset Library, you’ll own the path from real-world site walkthroughs and object captures to high-fidelity simulation scenes, applying expertise in 3D content pipelines, scene description formats, and physics-asset modeling to scale Apollo into new factories, warehouses, and homes. 

ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

• Ship an end-to-end environment capture pipeline that turns real-world site walkthroughs into high-fidelity simulation scenes, with collision proxy geometry that keeps depth sensors and LiDAR behaving correctly.
• Build a manipulable-object asset pipeline that turns customer parts, tools, and household objects into curated simulation assets with grounded mass, inertia, and friction properties.
• Define and operate the asset ingestion path into our managed asset store, including authoring tools, validation, versioning, and metadata schemas for scenes and objects.
• Drive physical fidelity of scene and object assets — collision geometry, contact properties, and material parameters — in close partnership with the Simulation Infrastructure team.
• Establish object-library curation and tagging conventions that scale as the Apollo deployment surface grows.
• Partner with Perception, ML Ops, and the Deployment / Field Engineering teams to onboard new customer sites into simulation faster than the next site arrives.

SKILLS AND REQUIREMENTS

• Strong proficiency in Python and modern C++
• Hands-on experience with a 3D content pipeline (Blender, Maya, Houdini, or equivalent)
• Working knowledge of modern scene description and physics-asset formats (OpenUSD, URDF, MJCF) and the geometric/inertial subtleties that make or break sim-to-real transfer
• Experience with at least one major physics simulator
• Experience with neural reconstruction (Gaussian splatting, NeRF), photogrammetry, or 3D capture pipelines
• Familiarity with collision geometry optimization for manipulation tasks (e.g., convex decomposition)

EDUCATION and/or EXPERIENCE

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Robotics, Computer Engineering, or related field (or equivalent experience)
• 5+ years of experience in software engineering, robotics simulation, 3D pipelines, or related fields

PHYSICAL REQUIREMENTS:

• Prolonged periods of sitting at a desk and working on a computer
• Must be able to lift 15 pounds at times
• Vision to read printed materials and a computer screen
• Hearing and speech to communicate