Senior Asset Pipeline Engineer - Sensor Platform

Applied Intuition • Sunnyvale, CA

7d • Onsite

About The Position

Applied Intuition's Sensor Simulation platform allows automotive and robotics customers to validate their perception systems using high-fidelity, physically accurate simulated sensor data. The platform is supported by a large and growing library of 3D simulation assets and the content pipeline that produces them. The company is investing in the next generation of this pipeline, built on OpenUSD, to ensure the asset library can scale and remain portable across the authoring tools and simulation engines that customers rely on. This role is a senior individual-contributor position focused on designing and owning this pipeline, bridging pipeline engineering, OpenUSD architecture, and simulation infrastructure. The engineer will be responsible for end-to-end design and core architecture decisions, collaborating with simulation and infrastructure teams to move the system from design to production.

Requirements

• Deep, practical OpenUSD composition expertise (references, variants, payloads, inherits, specializes), including designing and debugging composition stacks, not just consuming USD files.
• Experience authoring and validating custom USD schemas (API and applied schemas).
• Strong UsdShade material expertise: authoring, validating, and converting complex material networks.
• Experience building and owning automated DCC-to-engine pipelines in production, using version-controlled Python that runs in CI with downstream users (not prototypes or research).
• Experience managing USD at library scale, including versioning, identifier and namespace conventions, and validation across thousands of assets.

Nice To Haves

• NVIDIA Omniverse / Isaac Sim: Kit extensions (Python or C++), USD ingest, and Replicator / synthetic-data-generation pipelines.
• Houdini LOPs: native USD authoring and procedural scene graphs (indicates a strong understanding of USD concepts).
• MDL (Material Definition Language): physically-based material authoring and portability across renderers.
• Sensor simulation domain knowledge: understanding how material properties (reflectance, roughness, emissivity) influence lidar, radar, and camera outputs, beyond visual quality.
• Automotive, defense, or robotics simulation experience: contexts where sensor fidelity is critical beyond visual aesthetics (ROS 2 / scene assembly is a plus).

Responsibilities

• Design the OpenUSD schema and composition strategy (references, variants, payloads, custom schemas) for a large, versioned 3D asset library that must scale across authoring tools and simulation engines.
• Build and own automated pipelines that move assets between DCC tools and real-time/simulation engines, eliminating manual hand-offs.
• Define automated validation gates to catch asset-integrity and fidelity issues in CI before they reach production.
• Solve material conversion for simulation: translate complex authored materials into USD-native representations (UsdShade, and MDL where needed) while preserving the physical fidelity required for sensor simulation, going beyond just visual appearance.
• Design the asset metadata strategy to power discovery, semantic labeling, and downstream tooling.
• Take the pipeline from design through production, focusing on observability, reliability, and a smooth experience for content authors.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed