Founding Simulation Engineer

About the company We're an early-stage robotics startup building aerial robots that perform physical maintenance tasks in the field - work that today requires sending skilled crews to remote or hazardous sites. We're pre-seed, assembling our founding team, and moving fast toward our first paying pilot with a utility customer. About the role We're hiring a founding simulation engineer to build and own our simulation stack - from open-loop dynamics modeling to closed-loop control and autonomy testing. Your work will directly shape how fast we can iterate on control and autonomy without burning real-world flight/test time, and how confident we are before deploying to physical hardware. What you'll do

• Build and maintain open-loop dynamics models of the platform (rigid body + actuated mechanism dynamics)
• Develop closed-loop simulation environments for control and autonomy testing, including disturbance and edge-case scenarios
• Work with controls/autonomy engineers to validate algorithms in sim before hardware testing
• Help build sim-to-real transfer methodology to shorten the gap between simulated and field performance
• Instrument simulation environments for regression testing as the platform evolves

What we're seeking Must have

• Experience building physics-based simulation environments (e.g. MuJoCo, Gazebo, Isaac Sim, or custom)
• Strong background in dynamics modeling and control theory (open-loop and closed-loop)
• Comfortable working close to hardware - this isn't purely academic simulation work
• Software engineering proficiency (Python and/or C++)

Nice to have

• Experience simulating aerial, legged, or other dynamically unstable platforms
• Background in sim-to-real transfer or domain randomization techniques
• Prior experience at a robotics or autonomous vehicle company
• Familiarity with grid, utility, or other critical infrastructure operating environments