Member of Technical Staff - Robot Simulation

About the Company

At Machenta, we’re building intelligence that lets any robot learn any new skill as quickly as a human can: instantly, from a single example. We believe that achieving human-level adaptability in the physical world is a key milestone in the future of physical AI, and we’re already seeing glimpses of that future today. As a team, we’re united by this shared vision, and we work closely together in person to bring it to life. On the back of our $40m seed round, we’re now moving into a new office and lab space in the heart of King’s Cross, London. But we’re still right at the beginning here, and we’re looking for the right people to join us all for what lies ahead next. Robotics and machine learning span a diverse technical stack, and wherever you sit within it, everyone at Machenta takes ownership of their part of the company. If that kind of ownership resonates with you, and you’re excited about building together with an ambitious, closely-knit team, then we’d love to speak with you.

About the Role

As a Member of Technical Staff working on simulation, you’ll build the worlds our robots learn and are tested in. You’ll design diverse environments and task suites, own the benchmarking stack we use to measure progress in instant robot learning, and make our simulators faster and more faithful to reality. You’ll also take on some of the hardest problems in simulation, from deformable objects like cloth and cables to complex, contact-rich dynamics. It’s a highly hands-on, collaborative role: what you build will shape how every model at Machenta is trained and evaluated, and you’ll work closely with everyone across the company to make sure simulation tells us something true about the real world. If you enjoy building systems that others rely on every day, you’ll find this work very rewarding.

In This Role You Will:

• Design and build diverse simulation environments and task suites for training and evaluating robot policies.

• Own the simulation benchmarking and evaluation stack for instant robot learning, making sure it gives a reliable picture of progress.

• Optimise simulator speed and fidelity, including large-scale, GPU-parallelised simulation.

• Lead our simulation of deformable objects and complex, contact-rich dynamics, such as cloth, cables and soft bodies.

• Build tooling for procedural generation of scenes, assets and tasks at scale.

What We Hope You’ll Bring:

• Hands-on experience building robotics simulation environments with physics engines such as Isaac Sim/Lab or MuJoCo.

• A strong understanding of rigid-body dynamics, contact modelling and numerical integration, and how they affect simulation accuracy and stability.

• Strong Python skills, and experience writing performance-critical code.

• Experience optimising simulation performance, for example through GPU parallelisation, profiling or vectorised environments.

• A rigorous approach to evaluation and benchmarking: designing tasks and metrics that measure what actually matters.

• Clear communication of your ideas and findings to the team.

Bonus Points If You Have:

• Experience simulating deformable objects, such as cloth, cables or soft bodies, using methods like FEM, position-based dynamics or MPM.

• Experience with sim-to-real transfer, including domain randomisation or system identification.

• Experience with GPU programming, such as CUDA, Warp or JAX.

• Experience with procedural content generation, 3D asset pipelines or photorealistic rendering.

• Experience training or evaluating robot learning policies in simulation.

• A PhD in a relevant field.

• Experience at an early-stage robotics or AI company.

Join Us

We’re setting out to change how robots learn, and we know it’s an ambitious goal. If you’re excited by the idea of robots picking up new skills the moment they’re shown, and want to help build that future from the ground up, we’d love to hear from you. This role is based in person at our office in London.