Staff Software Engineer, Simulation

📋 Description

• • Shape the future of autonomous aviation ground operations by owning the simulation backbone that lets our fleet of self-driving baggage tractors, belt loaders, and push-back tugs operate safely on active aprons across the globe. You will architect, build, and scale the high-fidelity digital twin that every new algorithm must conquer before it ever meets a real aircraft.
• • Own the end-to-end life-cycle of our simulation platform—from deterministic physics engines and GPU-accelerated sensor models to cloud orchestration that spins up 100,000 virtual ramp scenarios nightly. Your code will decide whether a perception model can spot a marshaller’s wand in a blizzard or whether a planner can thread a 40-ton loader between two A380s with centimetre accuracy.
• • Lead the design of deterministic yet stochastic test harnesses that replicate weather, lighting, and human behaviour variations seen at JFK in January and Dubai in July. You will parameterise wind shear, tyre-spray, jet-blast, and FOD (foreign-object debris) so that our autonomy stack experiences every edge case before a human ramp agent ever relies on it.
• • Drive integration of simulation into our CI/CD pipeline so every pull request triggers thousands of regression tests in under 15 minutes. You will build dashboards that surface failure modes, annotate disengagements, and auto-generate synthetic corner cases to keep our safety metrics ahead of FAA and EASA guidelines.
• • Partner with perception, planning, and controls teams to translate real-world logs into actionable simulation scenarios. You will mine petabytes of flight-line telemetry to create “golden” data sets and use generative AI to augment them with rare but catastrophic events—like a sudden fuel-truck incursion—ensuring our stack learns from incidents that have never actually happened.
• • Establish rigorous KPIs—collision-free kilometres, mission success rate, sensor drop-out tolerance—and automate their measurement across cloud fleets. You will present weekly reports to the CTO and customer airline safety boards, turning raw simulation metrics into compelling evidence of operational readiness.
• • Mentor a growing team of simulation, DevOps, and autonomy engineers. You will institute code-review rituals, design-pattern libraries, and performance benchmarking standards that turn ad-hoc scripts into production-grade infrastructure capable of certifying safety-critical systems.
• • Contribute to the technical roadmap that moves us from today’s deterministic sim to tomorrow’s closed-loop, reinforcement-learning training ground. You will evaluate emerging tools—NVIDIA Omniverse, Gaussian-splat NeRFs, scenario-based fuzzing—and decide what earns a place in our stack.
• • Champion a culture of safety and curiosity. Whether you are white-boarding a new multi-agent traffic generator or pair-programming a lidar-noise model at 2 a.m. to unblock a release, your passion for bullet-proof software will set the tone for the entire engineering organisation.
• • Enjoy the rare thrill of seeing your virtual creations come to life on real tarmacs. When you watch a fully loaded 777 push back with zero human input because your simulation proved the manoeuvre safe, you’ll know you helped redefine how the world moves passengers and cargo.