Principal Physics Engine Programmer, C++ (Modeling & Simulation)

Remote . Posted 2 months ago

The role

You will architect and build the core C++ simulation runtime for a next-generation wargaming and decision-support platform. This role involves designing entity-component systems, data-oriented architectures, and multithreaded execution systems to execute physics, behavior, and mission models.

What you will do

Architect and implement the core C++ runtime behind a large-scale, interactive wargaming platform.
Own the structure, performance, and long-term health of a substantial engine codebase.
Design and evolve an entity-component-system architecture.
Build data-oriented component storage, entity lifecycle management, and execution graphs.
Define engine interfaces for physics, AI, sensor, weapon, behavior, and environmental models.
Create stable extension points for model developers.
Design simulation loops, time stepping, event processing, and deterministic replay.
Develop multithreaded and task-based execution systems.
Optimize memory layout, allocation, cache locality, and data movement.
Profile and improve CPU utilization, memory use, latency, and throughput.

Required qualifications

Extensive professional C++ development experience, or equivalent experience, building performance-critical production software.
Significant experience in commercial game development, game-engine development, or a similarly performance-constrained real-time environment.
Experience shipping at least one commercial game, engine, platform, or interactive real-time product.
Demonstrated ownership of foundational engine systems.
Experience building or substantially extending a physics engine, game engine, simulation runtime, ECS, job system, or comparable core technology.
Expert command of modern C++, including object lifetimes, ownership, templates, concurrency, synchronization, profiling, and low-level debugging.
Strong understanding of data-oriented design, memory layout, cache behavior, allocation strategies, and performance-sensitive data structures.
Experience designing or extending an entity-component system or comparable composition-based runtime architecture.
Experience with engine loops, execution graphs, task systems, event systems, dependency management, or runtime scheduling.
Demonstrated ability to optimize against hard CPU, memory, latency, and frame- or tick-time budgets.
Experience using commercial profiling and debugging tools.
Working knowledge of real-time physics concepts such as coordinate systems, numerical integration, collision detection, spatial partitioning, constraints, and simulation stability.

Nice to have

Experience with SIMD, GPU compute, custom allocators, job systems, lock-free structures, or platform-specific optimization.
Experience supporting very large worlds or simulations containing large numbers of active entities.
Experience with engine-level serialization, snapshotting, replay, world partitioning, or streaming.
Familiarity with aerospace, robotics, autonomy, and defense simulations (e.g., HLA, DIS, OneSAF, JSAF, NGTS, STK, AFISM).
Experience supporting Air Force, Space Force, joint, or broader DoW acquisition and mission-analysis programs.
Experience developing models for sensors, weapons, electronic warfare, jamming, communications, logistics, or command and control.
Active U.S. security clearance (Secret, Top Secret, or SCI/SAP).

Benefits

Health care plan with 100% premium coverage, including medical, dental, and vision
401k with 5% matching
Paid Time Off (uncapped vacation, plus sick and public holidays)
Flexible hybrid or remote work arrangement
Relocation assistance for qualifying employees

Before you apply

Active Secret clearance or eligibility to obtain one.
US Citizenship may be required for certain project assignments involving security clearance.

About the company

Code Metal is the leader in automated software engineering. They use formal methods to ensure code is provably correct for customers including the U.S. Air Force, L3Harris, RTX, and Toshiba.