code-metal - Principal Physics Programmer, C++ (Modeling & Simulation)

Remote - USA *1w ago

Remote Principal NA Robotics Aerospace Programmer Principal C++SIMD

Requirements

• Eight or more years of professional C++ development, 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 rather than primarily gameplay features, scripting, tools, or application-level integrations. • 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 to diagnose CPU stalls, memory issues, thread contention, allocation problems, and cache inefficiencies. • Working knowledge of real-time physics concepts such as coordinate systems, numerical integration, collision detection, spatial partitioning, constraints, and simulation stability. • Experience designing APIs, plugin systems, SDKs, or extension frameworks used by other programmers. • Experience maintaining and improving a large C++ codebase while continuing to deliver production capabilities. • Experience leading major technical initiatives while remaining an active individual contributor. • Active Secret clearance or eligibility to obtain one. • STRONGLY PREFERRED: • 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, defense simulation, HLA, DIS, or AFSIM. • Active TS/SCI clearance.

Responsibilities

• 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 for representing large numbers of heterogeneous simulation entities. • Build data-oriented component storage, entity lifecycle management, system queries, execution graphs, and dependency-aware scheduling. • Define the engine interfaces through which physics, AI, sensor, weapon, behavior, and environmental models are registered and executed. • Create stable extension points that allow model developers to add capabilities without modifying or destabilizing the engine core. • Design simulation loops, fixed and variable time stepping, event processing, system ordering, state transitions, and deterministic replay. • Develop multithreaded and task-based execution systems that safely parallelize simulation workloads. • Optimize memory layout, allocation, cache locality, component access, serialization, and data movement. • Profile and improve CPU utilization, memory use, latency, throughput, and simulation rate against explicit performance budgets. • Build spatial indexing, broad-phase query, collision-candidate, visibility, and proximity-query infrastructure. • Integrate externally developed physics and mathematical models into a consistent, performant runtime. • Develop checkpointing, snapshotting, state replication, save-and-restore, and reproducible replay systems. • Establish clear architecture for networked and distributed simulation, including ownership, synchronization, prediction, and state transfer. • Build tooling that allows model developers to inspect entities, debug system execution, profile model cost, and understand simulation state. • Identify and eliminate architectural bottlenecks as simulation scale and model complexity increase. • Lead engine design reviews, mentor other programmers, and raise the standard for C++ architecture and performance engineering. • Remain deeply hands-on in implementation, profiling, debugging, and code review.

Benefits

• Bring game-engine rigor to a new domain: Apply the architecture and optimization practices of commercial games to mission-critical simulation. • Own the foundation: Define the runtime on which every physics, behavior, and mission model executes. • Work under real constraints: Build simulations that perform exceptionally well on modest hardware, not only on HPC clusters. • Solve engine-level problems: Work across ECS design, job systems, memory architecture, determinism, physics integration, and distributed execution. • Ship meaningful systems: Build technology that helps decision-makers evaluate force-design choices before resources and lives are committed in the real world. • Pay depends on experience, but we strive to be at the upper end of the salary range • 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 • Wage Transparency - The salary range for this role is not a guarantee of compensation or salary, as the final offer amount may vary based on factors including, but not limited to, individual proficiency, skills, experience, and location.