Research Engineer, Robotics: Physics Simulation and Sim-to-Real

The role

You will design, implement, and improve contact, friction, and constraint solvers to make simulators robust at scale. You will also fit simulation models to logged hardware data to bring simulated behavior closer to reality.

What you will do

• Design, implement and improve contact, friction and constraint solvers
• Find and remove failure modes that break large-scale training
• Make articulated robots and closed loops stable and accurate across simulators
• Choose integrators, timesteps and substeps with evidence
• Build stress and regression tests for physics
• Make assets simulation-ready
• Fit simulation models to logged hardware data
• Calibrate contact behaviour against recorded pushes, slides, grasps and handovers
• Keep the same robot consistent across simulators
• Own a sim-to-real correlation suite

Required qualifications

• PhD in robotics, mechanical engineering, applied mathematics, physics, computer graphics or a related field, or a Masters + 3 years of experience
• Bachelor’s degree and 3+ years of relevant industry experience
• Demonstrated depth in rigid-body dynamics and constrained multibody systems
• Solver or physics-engine code you wrote yourself in a research codebase, production engine, or widely used open-source simulator
• Track record of diagnosing and fixing simulation instability
• Experience fitting simulation parameters to measured data and validating against real-world recordings
• Proficiency in Python and C++
• Experience with robot description formats (URDF, MJCF, OpenUSD)
• Knowledge of at least one major simulation stack at source level

Nice to have

• GPU programming for physics (CUDA, NVIDIA Warp or JAX)
• Experience scaling simulation for reinforcement or imitation learning
• Experience with deformable, cable or FEM simulation
• Familiarity with differentiable simulation, Bayesian or gradient-based parameter estimation, or learned residual dynamics
• Experience in robot manipulation, grasping or contact-rich tasks
• Publications or open-source contributions in simulation, dynamics or sim-to-real transfer

Benefits

• Medical, dental, vision, basic life insurance, basic accidental death and dismemberment insurance, short-term disability, long-term disability, and an employee assistance program
• Voluntary life insurance, voluntary accidental death and dismemberment, health savings account, healthcare reimbursement arrangement, and health care and dependent care flexible spending account plans
• 401k plan
• $125 per month to assist with commuting or internet expenses
• $200 per month for fitness and wellbeing expenses
• Up to ten sick days per year
• Up to seven personal days per year
• Up to 20 vacation days per year
• Twelve paid holidays
• Annual bonuses
• Long-term incentive plan

Before you apply

• Must be authorized to work in the U.S.

About the company

Ai2 is a Seattle based non-profit AI research institute founded in 2014 by the late Paul Allen. Their mission is building breakthrough AI to solve the world’s biggest problems.