Senior / Staff Research Engineer, Simulation Assets & Content Systems

Waabi

17d • Hybrid

About The Position

Waabi is seeking a Senior / Staff Research Engineer to join a multidisciplinary team focused on building the content backbone of a best-in-class multi-sensor simulation stack. This role involves architecting and owning end-to-end asset pipelines, from raw sensor logs to simulation-ready representations, including validation, packaging, and serving into Waabi World. The position requires designing schemas, formats, and storage for a heterogeneous asset library, making ownership decisions on formats, compression, streaming, and cross-renderer interop. Additionally, the role involves building tooling and visualization for inspecting, comparing, debugging, and curating assets at scale, integrating cutting-edge research into the pipeline, and collaborating with autonomy and safety teams to ensure the asset catalog meets diverse and realistic demands for training and evaluation.

Requirements

• Experience reading and developing production-quality software at scale, not just prototypes.
• Shipped systems that other engineers and researchers depend on day-to-day.
• Built or extended large-scale 3D content pipelines — ingestion, processing, validation, versioning, and serving: for graphics, simulation, VFX, games, robotics, or AV.
• Understand the failure modes that emerge at tens of thousands of assets.
• Fluent across at least several of: traditional mesh/material/PBR, OpenUSD, NeRF, 3D Gaussian Splatting, and procedural/generative content.
• Understand the trade-offs between paradigms — fidelity, edit-ability, runtime cost, storage, interop, and can make pragmatic choices.
• Experience designing, launching, and debugging GPU jobs in the cloud (AWS, GCP, or equivalent), including job orchestration, cost modeling, and throughput optimization for batch and pipeline workloads.
• Write efficient and maintainable code in Python, as well as in at least one native systems language such as C++ or Rust.

Responsibilities

• Architect and own asset pipelines end-to-end: From raw sensor logs all the way into simulation-ready representations (e.g., 3DGS, NeRF, mesh, hybrid), validation, packaging, and serving into Waabi World.
• Design schemas, formats, and storage for a heterogeneous asset library spanning traditional mesh/material assets, neural representations, and generative-model outputs.
• Ownership of design decisions ranging from formats and compression, to streaming, and cross-renderer interop.
• Build tooling and visualization that lets research scientists, simulation engineers, and technical artists inspect, compare, debug, and curate assets at the scale of tens of thousands of items — including search, similarity, lineage, and regression review.
• Integrate cutting-edge research into the pipeline — collaborate with the neural rendering and generative AI teams to productionize the latest reconstruction, diffusion, and world-model techniques as first-class steps in the asset lifecycle.
• Collaborate with autonomy and safety teams to ensure the asset catalog meets the diversity, realism, and coverage demands of training and closed-loop evaluation.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation and equity awards.
• Health and Wellness benefits encompassing Medical, Dental and Vision coverage (for full-time employees only).
• Unlimited Vacation.
• Flexible hours and Work from Home support.
• Daily drinks, snacks and catered meals (when in office).
• Regularly scheduled team building activities and social events both on-site, off-site & virtually.

What This Job Offers

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