Simulation Applications Engineer
Application analysis
Simulation Applications Engineer at OpenAI is a forward deployed ai research lab role for engineers who want customer-facing technical work with real deployment ownership.
Reading this role
This Technical customer-facing role role centers on hands-on work with customers to ship and adopt technical products. Key signals from the listing: Kubernetes / containers, Python.
About OpenAI
OpenAI ships frontier models to real customers through small, high-trust engineering teams. Forward deployed roles sit between product, research, and enterprise buyers. The role is anchored in San Francisco, so expect on-site customer work in that region.
Signals in the listing
Stand out for Simulation Applications Engineer
- Lead your application with one paragraph tying Simulation Applications Engineer to a specific customer or deployment you owned — OpenAI hires for shipped outcomes, not tool lists.
- Mirror language from the job description in your examples — if they emphasize deployment, use deployment stories; if integration, use integration stories.
- Include a short “how I work with customers” section in your cover note: communication cadence, escalation instincts, and how you handle ambiguity.
- For Kubernetes-heavy roles, describe a cluster you operated: upgrades, networking, secrets, observability, and how you debugged a production outage.
- The posting mentions multiple languages — pick the one most relevant to this team and show production code, not tutorial exercises.
- This role is tied to San Francisco — mention willingness to work on-site with customers and any existing ties to that market (clients, partners, or domain knowledge).
Stand out at OpenAI
- Demonstrate customer obsession with safety constraints with a concrete example — OpenAI will probe for specifics, not buzzwords.
- Demonstrate writing and communication with a concrete example — OpenAI will probe for specifics, not buzzwords.
- Interview loops emphasize problem decomposition, taste in product, and whether you can earn trust with technical and non-technical stakeholders quickly.
- Read recent engineering blog posts, product launches, and customer stories on openai.com — reference one explicitly in your outreach to show genuine interest.
Tailored from this listing’s title, company, and description. Always verify requirements on the company careers page before applying.
Role description
About the Team
Our Robotics team is focused on unlocking general-purpose robotics and pushing towards AGI-level intelligence in dynamic, real-world settings. Working across the entire model stack, we integrate cutting-edge hardware and software to explore a broad range of robotic form factors. We strive to seamlessly blend high-level AI capabilities with the constraints of physical systems to improve peoples’ lives.
About the Role
We are hiring a Sim Application Engineer to turn simulation systems into reliable, automated, production-quality pipelines that power model training, evaluation, and hardware-in-the-loop validation. This role owns the automation, orchestration, and tool integration that apply simulation to concrete robotics tasks: building CI/CD for SIL/HIL, presubmit checks, automatic model evaluation, metric computation and reporting, and the runtime infrastructure to run simulations at scale. You will collaborate closely with Sim Realism, Sim Environments, Research, and Ops to make simulation an integrated, reproducible, and measurable part of our ML and robotics workflows. This role is based in San Francisco, CA, and requires in-person 4 days a week. In this role, you will:
- Build and maintain presubmit checks, continuous integration and deployment pipelines for simulation code, environments, and tasks so simulation artifacts are testable, versioned, and reproducible.
- Implement end-to-end automation to run model evaluation in sim (SIL) and orchestrate HIL runs; compute realism and task metrics, generate dashboards and alerts, and ensure evaluation is repeatable and auditable.
- Create robust APIs and connectors so research, training, and data-collection systems can schedule, seed, and evaluate batches of simulations; support RL rollouts, imitation-data collection, and presubmit model checks.
- Build scheduling, batching and orchestration for running very large numbers of concurrent rollouts (target tens of thousands of rollouts / large RL workloads), solve engine-level scaling (parallelization, batching multiple runs per engine), and optimize cloud/GPU runtime reliability.
- Produce metrics and tooling for measuring simulation health, throughput, fidelity regressions, and cost; create presubmit / canary tests that catch sim regressions early.
- Implement artifact versioning, environment immutability (images / asset versions), experiment provenance, and policies for resource quotas and cost control across the sim farm.
- Work closely with Sim Environments, Sim Realism, research, and ops to close the loop—ensuring simulation improvements directly translate into better model evaluation and training results.
You might thrive in this role if you:
- Have deep software engineering & infra experience: you’ve built CI/CD at scale, authored reliable pipelines, and shipped production services that coordinate many moving parts.
- Are comfortable with distributed compute and cloud GPU workloads: you know how to get many sims running concurrently (scheduling, batching, GPU orchestration) and optimize throughput/cost.
- Have built or maintained HIL/SIL workflows or other sim↔hardware integrations and understand the operational challenges of bridging software and hardware testbeds.
- Are strong with automation, observability and metrics: you enjoy instrumenting systems, defining meaningful KPIs, and surfacing regressions early.
- Can design APIs and developer ergonomics so research and SWE teams can easily submit jobs, reproduce experiments, and interpret results.
- Have experience with Python/C++/Rust, container orchestration (Kubernetes), distributed task queues, and CI systems; bonus if you’ve worked with RL tooling, task generators, or large-scale data pipelines.
- Enjoy collaborating across teams to turn experimental simulation work into dependable production tooling.
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 https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf. Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. 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. To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form https://form.asana.com/?d=57018692298241&k=5MqR40fZd7jlxVUh5J-UeA. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link https://form.asana.com/?k=bQ7w9h3iexRlicUdWRiwvg&d=57018692298241. OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy https://cdn.openai.com/policies/global-employee-and-contractor-privacy-policy.pdf At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.