Employer: Apptronik, Inc.

Job Title: Sr. Industrial Designer

Location: 11701 Stonehollow Drive, Suite 150, Austin, TX 78758 (May work from home on a hybrid schedule within commuting distance of the Austin, TX office.)

Duties: Responsible for concept generation and ideation through 2D or 3D sketching, modeling and rendering. Develop concepts into refined CAD design data. Collaborate with engineering departments to iterate on and validate design concepts, offer creative solutions to complex problems and add refinement to tightly constrained structural components. Take a considered and strategic approach to design by working with departments across the organization to understand and develop product and user requirements. Create 3D printed prototypes of concepts for evaluation, critique and further development. Produce high-quality renders that aid in decision-making, as well as express vision to the team and wider business.

Minimum Requirements: Bachelor's degree (or foreign equivalent) in Industrial Design, Collaborative Design, Product Design, or a closely related field plus seven (7) years of experience in a related occupation performing each of the following: Conducting industrial design with a strong portfolio showcasing innovative and user-centric designs; Leading concept generation and ideation; Using CAD software including Fusion 360, Alias, or Solidworks; Utilizing 3D visualization tools including Keyshot, Blender, or Unreal Engine; and Applying knowledge of manufacturing processes, materials, and their implications on design.

Alternative Requirements: Master's degree (or foreign equivalent) in Industrial Design, Collaborative Design, Product Design, or a closely related field and five (5) years of experience in a related occupation performing each of the following: Conducting industrial design with a strong portfolio showcasing innovative and user-centric designs; Leading concept generation and ideation; Using CAD software including Fusion 360, Alias, or Solidworks; Utilizing 3D visualization tools including Keyshot, Blender, or Unreal Engine; and Applying knowledge of manufacturing processes, materials, and their implications on design.

To Apply: Please visit our careers page at https://apptronik.com/careers.

JOB SUMMARY

We are seeking a Staff Simulation Engineer to spearhead the architecture and development of our core simulation infrastructure—the engine that powers our reinforcement learning and controls initiatives. In this role, you will be responsible for the continuous development, improvement, and maintenance of our simulation environments, scaling the platform to be robust, high-performance, and highly parallelized. You will own the technical roadmap for our simulation tools, ensuring seamless integration with robot control systems and learning frameworks to provide our teams with the foundational infrastructure needed to develop next-generation autonomous behaviors.

ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES or KEY ACCOUNTABILITIES:

• Simulation Infrastructure: Own the technical roadmap and architecture of the core simulation platform, building high-performance digital twins that serve as the foundation for Reinforcement Learning (RL) and Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model training, controls validation, and CI/CD integration testing.
• Massively Parallel Infrastructure: Design and scale cloud-native simulation pipelines capable of generating millions of experience hours per day, leveraging distributed computing frameworks to parallelize physics and rendering for rapid policy iteration.
• High-Fidelity Sim-to-Real Transfer: Bridge the reality gap by developing advanced contact models and actuator dynamics, ensuring that policies trained in simulation transfer zero-shot to physical humanoid hardware.
• Photorealistic Perception & World Building: Lead the development of sensor-realistic environments (camera, LiDAR, depth) that challenge the perception stack, creating the dynamic and diverse worlds necessary to robustify robot vision capabilities.
• Technical Strategy & Leadership: Serve as the technical authority on simulation, collaborating with Control and AI research teams to anticipate future needs and drive the evolution of tools.

 SKILLS AND REQUIREMENTS:

• Excellent C++ and Python programming skills 
• Familiar with best practices for software development, including CI/CD, automated testing, and code quality standards to ensure a robust and scalable codebase.
• Technical leadership experience in robotic simulation, including defining technical roadmaps and collaborating cross-functionally to align priorities and drive project execution.
• Understanding of Robotics concepts like kinematics, dynamics, controls, path planning and system identification.
• Experience with modern robotic simulators, like IsaacLab and MuJoCo.
• Understanding of Reinforcement Learning and VLAs with preferable experience in research or production environment
• Experience architecting and managing large-scale training workloads, including deploying parallel simulations on cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) with distributed computing frameworks (e.g., Ray, Kubernetes).
• Familiarity with the use of game engines like Unity or Unreal. 

EDUCATION and/or EXPERIENCE:

• Education: MS or PhD in relevant fields (Computer Science, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, etc.)
• Experience: Significant experience (8+ years or 5+ with a graduate degree) in developing robotic simulations for  high-performance, contact-rich, and dynamic robotic environments.

PHYSICAL REQUIREMENTS

• Prolonged periods of sitting at a desk and working on a computer
• Must be able to lift 15 pounds at times
• Vision to read printed materials and a computer screen
• Hearing and speech to communicate

#LI-AS1

Allen Control Systems (ACS) is a cutting-edge defense startup founded by two ex-Navy electrical engineers with a proven track record in robotics and software. We are developing a small, autonomous gun turret that employs advanced computer vision and control systems to precisely target and neutralize small drones and loitering munitions. Our innovative approach requires overcoming significant technical challenges, making this an exciting and dynamic environment for experienced engineers. 

With an engineering-first culture, ACS values technical excellence and continuous learning. Backed by our founders' successful exits from two previous ventures acquired for a combined $180M in 2022, we are committed to ensuring that the groundbreaking technologies we develop have a real-world impact. 

Position Overview:  

We are seeking a Data Platform Engineer who combines expert-level data infrastructure skills with a strong knowledge of AI & Machine Learning principles. In this role, you will go beyond simple data validation scripts; you will apply your understanding of model training dynamics to design and implement existing and novel approaches to optimize our datasets. 

You will build and maintain large-scale image and video pipelines, but with a focus on data curation strategies—such as coreset selection, embedding-based filtering, and automated complexity scoring. You’ll partner closely with our ML engineers to orchestrate ingestion, synthetic data generation, and versioned releases, ensuring that every dataset is not only high-integrity and available but strictly optimized to maximize model performance. 

What You’ll Do: 

• Design and develop a scalable data infastructure, focusing on organization and curation to support continuing increases in data volume and complexity
• Design and implement existing and novel approaches to optimize datasets for model training (e.g., hard example mining, class balancing, de-duplication, embedded-based filtering).
• Support the data infrastructure required for optimal ingestion, transformation, and storing of datasets
• Develop and use synthetic data generation workflows to create realistic synthetic training data for computer vision models.
• Design and own end-to-end image and video pipelines for computer vision model training: multi-source ingestion, QA and visualization, standardization, and organization.
• Coordinate collection of real-world data; coordinate label creation and QA with labelers.
• Develop and use data quality tooling: metrics for balance, drift, and annotation error; active-learning sampling to target gaps; feedback loops from production back to curation. 

• Implement and own dataset versioning, release management, and lineage and metadata cataloging.

What You’ll Need: 

• 3+ years of experience in data engineering or equivalent fields. 
• Solid understanding of data structures and systems design for orchestrating data-related workflows in a rapidly growing environment.
• Proficient in using AWS for data management and processing.
• Proficient in Python for scripting and data processing; proficient with SQL and Linux.
• Educational Background: Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science or a related field.
• Proven ability to communicate well across engineering teams, and write and maintain effective documentation. 

You’ll Stand Out: 

• 5+ years of industry experience.
• Experience in image/video data engineering for computer vision projects.
• Experience with PyTorch DeepCore.
• Experience with Unreal Engine. 

What We Offer: 

• Competitive salary
• ACS Equity Package
• Health, Dental, Vision Insurance
• Paid Time Off 

Allen Control Systems is an Equal Opportunity Employer, providing equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment. Allen Control Systems prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.