Simulation Environments Engineer

OpenAI OpenAI · AI Frontier · San Francisco, CA · Research

The role focuses on building tooling and infrastructure for creating high-coverage, realistic virtual environments for robotics research and evaluation. This involves designing content pipelines, authoring procedural generators, and shipping tools for environment creation, quality control, and integration with simulation farms and ML evaluation pipelines. The role sits at the intersection of game-engine practice, asset engineering, and large-scale simulation infrastructure.

What you'd actually do

  1. Build interactive and programmatic tooling to describe, preview, and validate scenes and tasks so researchers can author scenarios quickly and repeatedly.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. Build frameworks for procedural generation and controlled randomization (visual, physical, kinematic) so models see a systematic, measurable variety of conditions.
  5. Define and enforce quality gates for environments (visual fidelity, collision correctness, physical plausibility) and instrument validation tooling so environments meet realism/coverage goals.

Skills

Required

  • Experience with modern world engines (NVIDIA Isaac Sim, Unity, Unreal Engine, Omniverse) or equivalent production pipelines
  • 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
  • Experience with quality control and validation — designing automated checks and visual/quantitative diagnostics
  • Ability to collaborate across functions

Nice to have

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

What the JD emphasized

  • high-coverage, realistic virtual environments
  • tooling and infrastructure
  • procedural generation and controlled randomization
  • quality gates for environments
  • validation tooling

Other signals

  • Robotics team focused on unlocking general-purpose robotics and pushing towards AGI-level intelligence in dynamic, real-world settings.
  • Build tooling and infrastructure for high-coverage, realistic virtual environments for robotics research and evaluation.
  • Design pipelines for importing and vetting 3rd-party content, author procedural and randomized scenario generators, and ship ergonomic tools.