Job Title:
Senior Simulation Engineering Manager
Department:
Software Engineering
Job Level:
L5
FLSA:
Exempt
Job Summary:
The Simulation & Test Automation Engineering Manager leads the team responsible for building, maintaining, and scaling the simulation and automated testing platforms that support our robotics development lifecycle. This role combines strong people leadership with deep technical experience across simulation frameworks, distributed test systems, and automation tooling. You will own team bandwidth, prioritize incoming work, and ensure high-quality, reliable infrastructure for validating robot behavior at scale.
Responsibilities
People & Execution
- Own team capacity, staffing, and prioritization across all simulation and test infrastructure work.
- Work with Directors and engineering TLs to define quarterly/yearly roadmaps and engineering commitments.
- Provide clear, data-driven decisions on tradeoffs, sequencing, and resource allocation.
- Lead hiring, performance evaluations, career development, and coaching for engineers.
Technical Oversight
- Oversee the architecture and operation of simulation tools (Gazebo), automated test pipelines, and orchestration systems.
- Partner with TLs on long-term strategy for simulation fidelity, performance, and scalability.
- Ensure reliability, reproducibility, and consistency across simulation and automated testing environments.
- Drive improvements in CI/CD integration, automation frameworks, and system observability.
Cross-Functional
- Collaborate closely with navigation, perception, behavior, hardware, and QA teams to ensure simulation tools meet cross-team needs.
- Coordinate complex test requirements and surface integration risks early.
- Translate team and system requirements into actionable plans and realistic commitments.
- Communicate system constraints, simulation limitations, and technical tradeoffs clearly to stakeholders and leadership.
Qualifications
- 5+ years of experience in robotics simulation, automation infrastructure, or backend/distributed systems.
- Strong background with Gazebo (or similar simulators), ROS/ROS2, Docker, VM/container orchestration, and Python.
- Experience designing or operating large-scale automated test systems or CI/CD pipelines.
- 2+ years managing or technically leading engineers.
- Comfort balancing technical depth with organizational leadership and cross-team coordination.
- Experience with cloud orchestration, distributed job systems, or robotics CI frameworks is a strong plus.
Physical Requirements
- The physical demands described here are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.
- Prolonged periods of sitting/standing at a desk and working on a computer. The employee routinely is required to sit; stand, walk; talk and hear; use hands to keyboard
- Specific vision abilities required by this job include close vision, color vision, peripheral vision, depth perception, and ability to adjust focus.
- Ability to lift 30 lbs.
