SimOps Engineer

JOB SUMMARY

Apptronik is seeking a SimOps Engineer to architect and maintain the large-scale simulation infrastructure required for Apollo, our general-purpose humanoid robot. In this role, you will apply high-fidelity simulation rigor to humanoid robotics, managing the lifecycle of virtual environments used for locomotion, dexterous manipulation, and synthetic data collection. You will build the scalable frameworks and automated pipelines that allow our teams to perform system-level optimization and reliability analysis, ensuring that virtual testing accurately mirrors the real-world physical performance of Apollo.

ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES or KEY ACCOUNTABILITIES

• Humanoid Simulation Frameworks: Architect and implement scalable, highly-available simulation frameworks. These should support high-fidelity humanoid dynamics, including complex joint interactions and balance controllers, while enabling domain randomization and synthetic data generation.
• HPC & Cloud Orchestration: Deploy and manage High-Performance Computing (HPC) clusters (e.g., GCP, on-prem) to enable sub-24-hour turnaround for massive, ad-hoc simulation requests and parallelized training workloads.
• Metrics & Visualization: Establish robust observability and monitoring to provide insight into simulation health, utilization, and performance.
• Custom Tooling: Develop specialized tools and dashboards (e.g., using Python, Grafana, FastAPI, or Dash) to visualize complex simulation results that require custom interaction or specialized plotting.
• Automated Data Pipelines: Create automated pipelines to extract, transform, and load (ETL) simulation data for large-scale training and performance benchmarking.
• CI/CD & Sim-in-the-loop Testing: Establish CI/CD pipelines for automated code generation and Simulation-in-the-Loop performance benchmarking to catch regressions early in the development cycle.

SKILLS AND REQUIREMENTS

• Robotics Simulation: Expertise in tools such as IsaacSim/IsaacLab, MuJoCo, Gazebo, Omniverse.
• Monitoring & Dashboards: Proficiency with tools like Grafana for infrastructure and telemetry visualization.
• High-Performance Computing: Demonstrated experience managing GPU-accelerated HPC clusters on cloud platforms (e.g., AWS/GCP) or on-prem systems.
• Programming Proficiency: Advanced Python or C++ skills; experience with web frameworks for building internal research tools is a plus; experience with ROS/ROS2 is a plus.
• Automation: Hands-on experience with GitLab, Jenkins, or GitHub Actions for automating software builds and simulation testing.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Comfort deploying IaC using tools like Kubernetes, Helm, Terraform, Ansible, Docker.
• System Optimization: Proven ability to conduct system-level optimization for complex robotic architectures to identify high-performance hardware/software solutions.

EDUCATION and/or EXPERIENCE

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field.
• Minimum of 5 years of professional, full-time experience in simulation or infrastructure engineering, with a track record of improving simulation through automation. 

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