Simulation Environments Engineer

Details

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 people’s 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 third-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.

Responsibilities

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

Requirements / Preferred Experience

• Practical experience with modern world engines or equivalent production pipelines (NVIDIA Isaac Sim, Unity, Unreal Engine, Omniverse) and the ability to choose and integrate the right platform for each use case.
• Comfortable with the full content pipeline: CAD/asset import, USD/glTF/FBX/texture workflows, collision mesh generation, LODs, and material/physics metadata.
• Experience building or using procedural generation and domain randomization systems to produce broad, task-relevant variability.
• Experience designing automated checks and visual/quantitative diagnostics for quality control and validation of environments.
• Experience integrating environment tooling with CI/CD, presubmit checks, large-scale simulation farms, and model evaluation pipelines.
• Strong collaboration skills — you will work closely with researchers, physics/realism engineers, software and robotics engineers, and vendors.

Benefits

• Base pay range: $255,000 - $405,000 (varies by location, experience, and other individualized factors). Offers equity and may include performance-related bonuses for eligible employees.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses.
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match.
• Paid parental leave, paid medical and caregiver leave, flexible PTO for exempt employees.
• 13+ paid company holidays and additional paid company office closures; paid sick or safe time as required by applicable law.
• Mental health and wellness support; employer-paid basic life and disability coverage.
• Annual learning and development stipend.
• Daily meals in offices and meal delivery credits as eligible.
• Relocation support for eligible employees.
• Additional taxable fringe benefits (charitable donation matching, wellness stipends) may be provided.

Company

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 AI capabilities and seek to safely deploy them. We are an equal opportunity employer and provide reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities. Background checks will be administered in accordance with applicable law.