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Code Metal is building an automated software engineering platform that uses formal methods to verify AI-generated code. The company works with defense and aerospace customers including the U.S. Air Force, L3Harris, RTX, and Toshiba to modernize legacy code, optimize performance, and move prototypes to production.
The Modeling & Simulation team is developing a next-generation wargaming and decision-support platform to help the Department of War make multi-billion-dollar force-design decisions. This platform spans simulation and physics, backend and data systems, frontend and geospatial visualization, and AI systems.
As Principal Physics Programmer, you will architect and build the core C++ simulation runtime that executes physics, behavior, and mission models. Your scope includes architectural authority and mentorship responsibility. You will own the structure, performance, and long-term health of a substantial engine codebase.
Key responsibilities include: architecting entity-component-system architecture for large numbers of heterogeneous simulation entities; designing data-oriented component storage, entity lifecycle management, and dependency-aware scheduling; defining engine interfaces for physics, AI, sensor, weapon, behavior, and environmental models; creating stable extension points for model developers; designing simulation loops with fixed/variable time stepping and deterministic replay; developing multithreaded and task-based execution systems; optimizing memory layout, allocation, cache locality, and data movement; profiling and improving CPU utilization against explicit performance budgets; building spatial indexing and proximity-query infrastructure; integrating externally developed physics models; developing checkpointing and reproducible replay systems; establishing architecture for networked and distributed simulation; building debugging and profiling tooling; identifying and eliminating architectural bottlenecks; leading engine design reviews and mentoring other programmers; remaining deeply hands-on in implementation, profiling, debugging, and code review.
The strongest candidates come from commercial game development, game-engine development, or other performance-constrained real-time environments. Defense experience is not required; the company prioritizes shipped real-time C++ systems, performance optimization under hard budgets, and foundational architectural decisions within complex engine codebases.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 10+ years of professional C++ development experience building performance-critical production software
- Significant experience in commercial game development, game-engine development, or similarly performance-constrained real-time environment
- Shipped at least one commercial game, engine, platform, or interactive real-time product
- Demonstrated ownership of foundational engine systems (not primarily gameplay, 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++: object lifetimes, ownership, templates, concurrency, synchronization, profiling, low-level debugging
- Strong understanding of data-oriented design, memory layout, cache behavior, allocation strategies, 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, runtime scheduling
- Demonstrated ability to optimize against hard CPU, memory, latency, and frame/tick-time budgets
- Experience using commercial profiling and debugging tools to diagnose CPU stalls, memory issues, thread contention, allocation problems, cache inefficiencies
- Working knowledge of real-time physics concepts: coordinate systems, numerical integration, collision detection, spatial partitioning, constraints, simulation stability
- Experience designing APIs, plugin systems, SDKs, or extension frameworks used by other programmers
- Experience maintaining and improving large C++ codebases while delivering 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 with large numbers of active entities
- Experience with engine-level serialization, snapshotting, replay, world partitioning, or streaming
- Familiarity with aerospace, robotics, autonomy, and defense simulations (HLA, DIS, OneSAF, JSAF, NGTS, STK, AFISM)
- Experience supporting Air Force, Space Force, joint, or broader DoD acquisition and mission-analysis programs
- Experience developing models for sensors, weapons, electronic warfare, jamming, communications, logistics, or command and control
- Active U.S. security clearance (Secret, Top Secret, or SCI/SAP)
