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Salary: USD 208,000 - 263,000 / annual
Atoms is building Physical AI—real-world robots for industries including food, mining, and transport. The company integrates hardware, software, AI, operations, and manufacturing to deploy autonomous systems at scale.
As Technical Lead for Simulation, you will own the architecture and validation infrastructure that gates autonomy releases. This is a hands-on leadership role spanning platform design, team mentorship, and cross-functional collaboration.
Key responsibilities:
- Design and own the simulation platform architecture, including simulation clock/step control, run identity, determinism, reproducibility, batch execution, and log storage/indexing.
- Build and maintain the log replay pipeline: converting recorded logs into replayable test cases, open-loop scoring of perception and localization against ground truth, and closed-loop replay.
- Define scenario schema, library, and coverage definitions; structure commit, nightly, regression, and release-validation test suites.
- Establish release gating criteria, reporting, and resolution paths for failing scenarios.
- Evaluate commercial simulation platforms versus in-house development; make build-versus-buy recommendations with cost, lead time, coverage, and maintenance analysis; own resulting vendor relationships.
- Measure and report simulation fidelity—where vehicle behavior matches simulation and where it diverges.
- Set engineering practices for testing, review, documentation, and result reporting; mentor team engineers and participate in hiring.
- Serve as internal customer interface for autonomy engineering, robotics, safety, testing, and other teams; represent simulation priorities and constraints; incorporate requirements into roadmap.
The role requires five days per week onsite in San Francisco.
Requirements:
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, or related field, with 8+ years of relevant experience.
- 2+ years as a technical lead or engineering manager, setting technical direction and driving consensus.
- Ownership of a production simulation platform running in continuous integration, with accountability for determinism, reproducibility, and scale execution.
- Hands-on experience building log replay at scale, including ground-truth scoring and closed-loop divergence handling.
- System-level scenario-based testing experience: scenario libraries, coverage definitions, test suite architecture.
- Proficiency in C++ and Python; ability to read, navigate, and debug large codebases.
- Demonstrated build-versus-buy judgment on simulation or test infrastructure, including post-decision maintenance cost awareness.
- Experience with autonomous vehicle or robotics platforms; working understanding of sensing, perception, localization, planning, and controls.
- Experience with robotics middleware and its logging/replay tooling.
- Experience handling autonomous driving or robotics sensor data across multiple modalities (camera, LiDAR, radar) and timestamps.
- Track record of mentoring engineers and raising technical standards.
- Working fluency with modern AI coding and agentic development tools.
