Senior Asset Pipeline Engineer - Sensor Platform

Applied Intuition • Sunnyvale, CA

9d • $151,000 - $230,000 • 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 relies on a large, 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 used by customers. This is a senior individual-contributor role focused on pipeline engineering, OpenUSD architecture, and simulation infrastructure, where the engineer will design and own the end-to-end pipeline, making core architectural decisions and collaborating with simulation and infrastructure teams to bring 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.
• MDL (Material Definition Language): physically-based material authoring and portability across renderers.
• Sensor simulation domain knowledge: understanding how material properties (reflectance, roughness, emissivity) drive lidar, radar, and camera outputs beyond visual quality.
• Automotive, defense, or robotics simulation experience: contexts where sensor fidelity matters beyond visual aesthetics (ROS 2 / scene assembly 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 to move assets between DCC tools and real-time/simulation engines, eliminating manual hand-offs.
• Define automated validation gates to identify 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, not just visual appearance.
• Design the asset metadata strategy to support discovery, semantic labeling, and downstream tooling.
• Take the pipeline from design through production, focusing on observability, reliability, and a smooth experience for content authors.

Benefits

• Applied Intuition is an equal opportunity employer and federal contractor or subcontractor. Consequently, the parties agree that, as applicable, they will abide by the requirements of 41 CFR 60-1.4(a), 41 CFR 60-300.5(a) and 41 CFR 60-741.5(a) and that these laws are incorporated herein by reference. These regulations prohibit discrimination against qualified individuals based on their status as protected veterans or individuals with disabilities, and prohibit discrimination against all individuals based on their race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or national origin. These regulations require that covered prime contractors and subcontractors take affirmative action to employ and advance in employment individuals without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, protected veteran status or disability. The parties also agree that, as applicable, they will abide by the requirements of Executive Order 13496 (29 CFR Part 471, Appendix A to Subpart A), relating to the notice of employee rights under federal labor laws.

What This Job Offers

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