Staff Software Engineer- Virtual Warehouse Simulation

Staff Software Engineer- Virtual Warehouse Simulation Location: Waltham, MA We are seeking a Staff Software Engineer to own the design, development, and scaling of our virtual warehouse simulation infrastructure for Stretch's case picking application. Stretch is already a proven industry powerhouse in truck unloading at customer sites, and case picking represents its next major phase of commercial deployment — robots navigating massive warehouse environments, picking cases from racking aisles, building pallets, and coordinating as fleets. Case picking requires simulation capabilities that go well beyond what we have today. The core challenge is scale: building and rendering warehouse environments with hundreds of meters of travel distance and thousands of pick locations, simulating lidar and cameras with enough fidelity to develop navigation and perception algorithms, and doing it all fast enough to be useful for daily development. These environments are far too large to validate on hardware alone. You will be the technical owner of virtual warehouse simulation: building environments at production scale, simulating lidar and cameras with sufficient fidelity for navigation and perception development, scripting multi-agent scenarios, and integrating simulation into CI for regression testing. To thrive in this role, you'll need expertise in large-scale 3D environments, rendering pipelines, and sensor simulation, combined with enough robotics background to understand what navigation and perception developers actually need from their sim tools. You'll need the pragmatism to deliver useful increments quickly and the judgment to make high-stakes build-vs-integrate technology decisions. This is a high-autonomy, high-impact role: you will set the technical direction for this domain and be a primary developer of the system — not just an architect handing off designs. You'll influence the work of engineers across multiple teams and be accountable for whether simulation actually accelerates case picking development. Key Responsibilities: Own the technical vision, architecture, and roadmap for the virtual warehouse simulation platform, aligned with Boston Dynamics' broader simulation investments. Be a primary hands-on developer of the system, not just its architect. Design and implement warehouse-scale simulation environments with thousands of static assets (racking bays, pallets, obstacles) supporting the full range of customer site configurations. Drive requirements for developing and integrating sensor simulation (2D lidar, RGB cameras, depth cameras, odometry with drift modeling) at sufficient fidelity to run the same localization, navigation, and perception algorithms used on hardware. Build tooling for scenario authoring, dynamic obstacle scripting, multi-agent coordination testing, and "jump to situation" capabilities that accelerate developer iteration. Integrate simulation with the on-robot software stack (navigation, localization, perception pipelines) and fleet management systems, enabling end-to-end virtual validation. Drive simulation into CI/CD pipelines — automated regression testing, capability progression tracking, and dashboards that give stakeholders visibility into development progress. Lead evaluation of simulation technology options and make defensible build-vs-integrate decisions based on focused evaluation sprints. Develop and maintain sim-to-real transfer validation practices: system identification, domain randomization, sim-to-sim cross-validation, and correlation tracking against hardware test results. Influence and technically guide other engineers contributing to simulation across teams; set technical standards for simulation code, test design, and scenario coverage. Collaborate with navigation, localization, perception, manipulation, and fleet software teams to understand their highest-priority development and testing needs and translate those into simulation capabilities. Desired Experience: Bachelor's degree (or higher) in Computer Science, Robotics, or a related field. 8+ years of experience developing software in a professional environment, with significant depth in simulation, real-time 3D environments, rendering, or robotics infrastructure. Demonstrated experience building or significantly extending simulation infrastructure — not just using simulators, but designing the environments, rendering pipelines, tools, and integrations that make them useful for development teams. Strong proficiency in C++ and Python within a Linux environment. Experience with large-scale 3D environment creation, asset pipelines (e.g., Blender, USD), and/or game engine or rendering frameworks (e.g., Unreal, Unity, Filament, Omniverse). Experience with one or more simulation frameworks relevant to robotics or autonomous systems (e.g., Isaac Sim, Gazebo, MuJoCo, O3DE). Depth in sensor simulation — particularly lidar modeling and camera rendering pipelines. Understands the tradeoffs between rendering fidelity, simulation speed, and sim-to-real transfer for perception and localization workloads. Familiarity with robotics system architecture and integrating simulation with real robot software stacks. Experience building simulation into CI/CD pipelines for automated regression testing. Track record of making pragmatic technical decisions — knowing when to build from scratch, when to integrate an external tool, and when "good enough" fidelity unlocks development velocity. Strong technical communication skills; ability to work cross-functionally with perception, navigation, and product teams. Nice to Have: Experience with GPU-accelerated simulation or rendering (CUDA, XLA/MJX, Omniverse/USD). Experience with synthetic data generation for training perception or ML models. Understanding of navigation and localization concepts (SLAM, path planning, odometry, loop closure) sufficient to build simulation tools that meaningfully exercise these systems. Experience with large-scale environment simulation — warehouses, factories, or other industrial settings with thousands of objects and long travel distances. Familiarity with fleet simulation, multi-agent coordination, or discrete-event simulation. Experience with warehouse automation or logistics applications Experience with safety system simulation and validation.