Simulation Environments Engineer
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
