Principal Architect, Simulation Platform

Karman•Ann Arbor, MI

56d•$200,000 - $240,000•Remote

About The Position

Karman is seeking a Principal Architect, Simulation Platform to lead the development of the Karman Digital Environment (KDE). KDE is a simulation platform designed to revolutionize how Karman is developed, verified, and brought to market. Currently, Karman's development and verification rely on shared physical systems, which limits iteration speed. KDE will remove this bottleneck by enabling simulation-driven development at scale, supporting various fidelity levels from rapid experimentation to system validation. This is a technical leadership role with company-wide impact, reporting to the VP, AI & Applications.

Requirements

Bachelor's or advanced degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Robotics, Physics, or a related field
10+ years in systems architecture, simulation platforms, real-time or hardware-in-the-loop systems, embedded systems, or high-performance distributed platforms
Experience as a hands-on player-coach leading small, high-performing engineering teams
A proven track record designing and delivering simulation platforms or large-scale test systems that other engineering teams treat as production hardware, including data ingestion, telemetry, and playback at production scale, and the ability to design platform APIs and data contracts used by multiple teams
Deep expertise in system-level behavior — scheduling, concurrency, memory access patterns, latency budgets, jitter measurement, and determinism at sub-millisecond scale
Substantive fluency in the physics of the simulated domain — for this role, AC power distribution, control-loop dynamics, and electrical protection systems — is sufficient to make architectural decisions independently. Candidates from adjacent domains (automotive powertrain, aerospace propulsion, grid simulation, robotics dynamics) who've reached comparable depth will also be considered
Experience leading or contributing to a novel modeling problem in the platform's domain
Strong communication skills, with the ability to translate complex system designs for technical and non-technical stakeholders alike
Willingness to travel up to 25% of time

Nice To Haves

Experience with GPU-based systems or other accelerators, including power and performance tradeoffs
Experience in data center power infrastructure or hyperscaler energy-aware computing
Familiarity with AI inference serving systems (vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, Triton) sufficient to reason about workload-driven power dynamics

Responsibilities

Own the end-to-end architecture of KDE as the simulation platform for developing, testing, and validating Karman before production deployment.
Architect systems spanning heterogeneous time domains — from sub-millisecond control paths to system-level orchestration — with coherent time management and deterministic behavior across both.
Design and evolve the core simulation platform: time synchronization across paced (real-time SIL) and unpaced (batch) execution modes, signal routing and data flow orchestration, deterministic replay and scenario execution, and the platform APIs and data contracts consumed by algorithm, QA, product, and GTM teams.
Define and maintain the platform's performance envelope — latency, jitter, throughput, and fidelity — and lead optimization across the full stack.
Serve as the technical authority for simulation and validation methodology, partnering with algorithm, QA, product, hardware, firmware, and GTM teams to align platform capabilities with real-world Karman deployments.
Build and lead an engineering team spanning real-time systems, simulation infrastructure, power systems modeling, and GPU calibration, while remaining deeply hands-on in architecture and critical technical decisions.
Represent KDE on a standing cross-functional council with Algorithms, Product, GTM, and QA, arbitrating priorities across the platform's customers and maintaining architectural direction with senior peers.