Software Engineer — Distributed Simulation Systems

Astera Institute • Emeryville, CA

1d • Hybrid

About The Position

The Astera Institute is seeking a software engineer to build the core infrastructure for large-scale distributed simulation systems, including biological systems and physics-based environments. This role focuses on distributed computation, high-performance networking, scalable simulation pipelines, and biological and 3D physics simulation systems. You will work at the intersection of distributed computing, high-performance C++, biological system simulation, 3D physics simulation, and networking infrastructure.

Requirements

• Strong C++ systems programming experience
• Experience with distributed systems
• Experience with networking protocols and distributed communication
• Experience with MuJoCo or other 3D physics simulators
• Understanding of concurrency, multithreading, synchronization, and performance optimization
• Experience building performance-critical systems on Linux
• Familiarity with cluster or distributed compute environments

Nice To Haves

• Experience with Python and PyTorch
• Biological or neuroscience simulation experience
• Simulation engine development
• High-performance networking experience
• CUDA or GPU systems programming
• ECS / data-oriented engine architectures
• RDMA, shared memory, zero-copy networking, or custom transport layers
• Experience scaling simulations across many machines
• Experience with UI frameworks such as wxWidgets
• Experience building visualization or simulation tooling interfaces

Responsibilities

• Design and implement distributed simulation systems
• Build networking infrastructure for synchronized multi-node simulation
• Build and optimize MuJoCo-based 3D physics environments
• Develop infrastructure for large-scale biological system simulations
• Engineer communication systems for distributed simulators and agents
• Optimize simulation throughput across CPUs, GPUs, and clusters
• Develop distributed execution systems
• Profile and eliminate bottlenecks in networking, scheduling, memory, and synchronization
• Work on infrastructure spanning simulation, networking, orchestration, visualization, and tooling

What This Job Offers

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