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Simulation Engineer, Robotics

OpenAI
$325K - $405K
medical insurance, dental insurance, vision insurance, parental leave, paid time off, paid holidays, 401(k), retirement plan
United States, California, San Francisco
Aug 17, 2025

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 seeking a Simulation Engineer to chart the course for scaling our simulated embodiments in coverage, realism, and throughput. Your work will tighten the feedback loop between real-world experiments and virtual testing, allowing us to train and evaluate models faster and more safely. You will partner with experts across software, hardware, research, and operations to ensure our simulators faithfully capture the complexities of physical interaction while remaining easy for other teams to extend.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 4 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In this role you will:

  • Design, build, and maintain a high-performance, scalable simulator integrations that meshes cleanly with our existing codebase and data pipelines.

  • Create accurate digital twins of our in-house robots, tasks, controllers and sensors-or build authoring tools so other teams can do so with minimal friction.

  • Curate, convert, and quality-check open-source environment assets so they can be deployed at scale across our simulation farm.

  • Develop domain- and task-randomization frameworks that systematically expose models to diverse visual, physical, and kinematic conditions.

  • Lead proof-of-concept collaborations with external GPU-accelerated simulation vendors to benchmark new features and influence roadmap priorities.

  • Establish best practices for versioning, testing, and validating simulated scenarios against real-world benchmarks.

You might thrive in this role if you:

  • Enjoy plumbing every layer of a robotics simulation stack-from CAD import and asset optimization to real-time loading, contact dynamics and rendering.

  • Have led projects that bridge simulation and robotics, including teleoperation or hardware-in-the-loop testing.

  • Find satisfaction in building ergonomic tools, templates, and documentation that empower dozens of engineers and researchers to author new tasks quickly.

  • Have hands-on experience optimizing GPU pipelines, distributed compute jobs, or large-scale reinforcement-learning workloads.

  • Keep current with advances in physics engines, differentiable simulation, and synthetic-data generation for robot learning.

  • Want to build creative tasks to challenge cutting edge large action models.

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 safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity.

We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.

For additional information, please see OpenAI's Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with applicable law, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.

To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.

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At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.

Compensation Range: $325K - $405K

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