Senior Simulation Engineer

A robot can pick up a mug perfectly in simulation and still drop it on the first real try.

Before a humanoid robot handles anything in a factory, it has already practiced thousands of times in simulation. If the friction is slightly off or a contact point jitters, the policy learns a trick that only works inside the sim. On real hardware, the mug slips.

That's the challenge: building simulations accurate enough that what a robot learns there still works in the real world.

We're working with a humanoid robotics company that builds general-purpose humanoid robots and already deploys them in real industrial environments. Their VLA team teaches robots dexterous manipulation for industrial and service settings, and every one of those skills starts in simulation.

They're hiring a Senior Simulation Engineer to build those environments: gym environments for manipulation tasks, reward design, physics setup (contacts, friction, mass, joint limits), validating the sim against real robot data, and making training run faster on GPU clusters.

This is not a classic simulation role. You'll own the full loop, from designing the environment and the reward to checking that trained policies actually behave on the robot, and fixing the sim when they don't.

What they're looking for:

• 3+ years building simulation environments, with shipped products or published work to show
• Deep hands-on experience with MuJoCo, Isaac Sim / Isaac Lab, PyBullet, Drake, or physically accurate work in Unreal or Unity
• Strong Python: you can profile bottlenecks and debug physics issues
• Experience running large-scale parallel simulation on GPUs
• A plus: RL, reward design, domain randomization, contact-rich manipulation

Package:

• ~£185k–250k gross, depending on the level confirmed during interviews
• Relocation to London is required: the company covers relocation costs and helps with the visa and paperwork
• Stock options, private healthcare, 30+ paid days off