Simulation Lead, Robotics

About the Team

Our mission is to expand the capabilities of foundational models to support general-purpose robotics in dynamic, real-world environments, ensuring reliable and safe operation. These capabilities include, but are not limited to, action generation, motion planning, world modeling, and real-time communication through voice and emotions.

We work across the entire robotics stack, integrating cutting-edge hardware, sensors, end-effectors, and models to explore a diverse range of robotic form factors. Our goal is to develop models that provide state-of-the-art intelligence combined with seamless physical skills under the practical constraints of robotic platforms.

About the Role

You will own the entire simulation, evaluation, and validation stack, critical for developing safe and capable robotic systems. To that end, you will directly support a diverse set of software, hardware, safety, research, and product customers via multiple testing and training applications. The breadth in customer and application will require you to develop efficient solutions that balance between fidelity, quality, coverage/scale, and cost in both production and research settings. Applications you own will include developer-centric evaluation, synthetic data generation for training and testing, hardware morphology exploration, and final product offline validation. The role will require a mixture of excellent engineering fundamentals, strong technical leadership and vision setting skills, and research and development in topics such as world foundation models and safety critical AI systems validation.

You will be the founding member of this team, personally identifying the state-of-the-art, and laying the technical foundation for future team members. Over time, you will identify key hires and build a high talent density team. As a leader on the overall robotics project, you will be on the forefront of a new wave of robotics applications, leveraging existing and future OpenAI technologies to build AI powered robotics at scale.

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:

• Establish a long-term technical vision, strategy, and roadmap for robotics simulation at OpenAI, setting the standard for how AI-powered robots are tested, validated, and safely deployed.

• Architect a unified simulation platform that serves as the proving ground for robotics development, including open loop replay and closed loop synthetic simulation, both as standalone tools and as part of automated CI/CD workflows.

• Pioneer novel simulation paradigms using world foundation models and generative AI to address the sim-to-real domain gap and unlock the ability to find rare and nuanced issues entirely offline.

• Explore cost effective and scalable RL “gym” style simulators to address data sparsity and enable training of complex behaviors.

• Develop simulation tools to explore robot morphology variants, and thus accelerate/derisk hardware development.

• Define and drive a comprehensive synthetic data strategy to systematically measure and address coverage gaps with real-world data, directly accelerating model training and offline validation.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have a demonstrated track record of building and leading teams at the forefront of autonomous systems, robotics, and/or safety critical AI systems

• Possess deep technical understanding and hands-on experience in one or more of the following frontier areas: simulation of modular and end-to-end autonomy systems, generative models (eg. diffusion, world models), reinforcement learning at scale, evaluation and alignment for AI systems, especially agentic systems.

• Have worked closely with systems engineering and safety teams, and can translate formal methods, such as hazard analysis, into modern AI development contexts

• Lead through influence: excel at setting vision, driving alignment, and ultimately completing projects with cross-functional partners in hardware, software, research, data, safety, and product.

• Are adept at navigating deep product and technical ambiguity on complex multi-million dollar projects.

• Thrive on impact, are metrics oriented and data driven in both team and technical matters

• Are energized by defining and applying the latest in robotics and AI research to practical applications with real-world impact.

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.

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