Software Development Engineer II, Robotics Simulation

Simulation Engineer

Join a team building the simulation platform that powers robotics development at Amazon. You will work at the intersection of physics simulation, 3D asset pipelines, and platform engineering, building infrastructure that lets robotics teams design, train, and validate robots in virtual environments before physical prototypes exist. Your work will help unlock automation solutions, including systems requiring large-scale training iterations, that traditional hardware-first development cannot achieve.

Key job responsibilities:

• Design and implement simulation features (physics models, joint types, sensor models) that generalize across multiple robotics programs
• Build and maintain automated pipelines for converting 3D models and CAD assets into simulation-ready formats using USD and related standards
• Develop integration adapters and APIs that connect the simulation platform to production robotics software stacks
• Improve platform reliability, performance, and operational excellence through testing, monitoring, and continuous deployment practices
• Partner with robotics engineers to translate simulation requirements into reusable platform capabilities

A day in the life:

The hard part of robotics simulation is not modeling one robot. It is building a platform where any robotics team can compose a physically-realistic environment from reusable components, plug in their software stack, and start iterating, without waiting for your team to do it for them. That is the engineering challenge at the center of this role: designing abstractions that are general enough to serve programs with very different physics requirements, yet precise enough that engineers trust the results.

You will navigate tradeoffs constantly. A physics model that is accurate for one manipulator may be too expensive for a training workflow that needs thousands of parallel environments. A self-service asset pipeline needs to be flexible enough for diverse CAD inputs but constrained enough to produce reliable, simulation-ready outputs. Every design decision you make shapes whether the platform scales to the next ten programs or becomes a bottleneck.

On a given day, you might design a new joint abstraction that handles both rigid and compliant mechanisms, debug a contact model where simulated friction diverges from physical behavior, or architect a USD-based pipeline stage that lets teams convert and validate assets without filing a ticket. The team ships monthly releases, and the measure of success is not any single simulation experiment, but whether the platform capabilities you build become the reusable foundation that accelerates every robotics program that follows.

About the team:

The Simulation Engineering team builds physics-based simulation tools as part of Amazon Robotics' robotics development platform. Our mission is to make simulation the default starting point for robotics development, enabling teams to develop safer, more capable robots faster through sim-first workflows. We build standardized, reusable simulation capabilities that scale across robotics programs, so that every new program launches faster than the last.

We leverage industry-standard simulation engines and open-source robotics toolkits, and we contribute back to the open-source community. We are a small, high-impact team that values mentorship, generalized solutions, self-service tooling, and close collaboration with the robotics programs we serve. You will work alongside experienced engineers and scientists who invest in your growth, with clear paths to take on larger scope and advance your career as the platform and team scale. Our work spans C++, Python, physics engines, 3D asset pipelines, USD workflows, and cloud infrastructure.