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Code Metal is building an automated software engineering platform that uses formal methods to verify AI-generated code. The company serves defense and aerospace customers including the U.S. Air Force, L3Harris, RTX, and Toshiba, helping them modernize legacy systems 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. You will architect and build the core C++ simulation runtime that executes physics, behavior, and mission models developed by engineers and domain experts across the organization.
Your responsibilities include:
- Architect and implement the core C++ runtime for 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 engine interfaces through which physics, AI, sensor, weapon, behavior, and environmental models are registered and executed
- Create stable extension points for model developers to add capabilities without 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
- 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
At the Staff level, you will define and enforce the team's testing strategy and quality standards; design cross-cutting changes across the stack; provide architectural guidance; own technical scoping and execution strategy for complex, multi-sprint initiatives; serve as the primary technical gatekeeper for the team's codebase; and lead technical grooming, design spikes, and RFCs.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 7+ years of professional experience
- Extensive professional C++ development experience building performance-critical production software
- Significant experience in commercial game development, game-engine development, or a 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 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, and defense simulations (e.g., HLA, DIS, OneSAF, JSAF, NGTS, STK, AFISM)
- Experience supporting Air Force, Space Force, joint, or broader DoW 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)
