Staff Engineer, Autonomy Simulation Platform
Archer is an aerospace company based in San Jose, California building an all-electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft with a mission to advance the benefits of sustainable air mobility. We are designing, manufacturing, and operating an all-electric aircraft that can carry four passengers while producing minimal noise.
Our sights are set high and our problems are hard, and we believe that diversity in the workplace is what makes us smarter, drives better insights, and will ultimately lift us all to success. We are dedicated to cultivating an equitable and inclusive environment that embraces our differences, and supports and celebrates all of our team members.
As a Staff Autonomy Engineer on our Simulation Platform, you'll play a central role in bringing learned, intelligent behavior to real aircraft. You'll build the simulation and synthetic data platform used to test, evaluate, and train Physical AI systems-including VLA, VLN, and Perception models-supporting both real-world validation and ML training workflows.
What You’ll Do:
- Develop simulation environments, aircraft dynamics, sensor models, and the orchestration layer composing scenarios and missions
- Build tooling for large-scale, procedural, automated scenario generation and rendering
- Generate synthetic sensor and telemetry data for physical AI training via physics-based rendering
- Define evaluation metrics that turn simulation output into data-driven decisions
- Partner with flight test teams to keep simulated scenarios grounded in real-world conditions
- Set platform architecture and roadmap ahead of team growth
What You Need:
- 5+ years in simulation, robotics, or backend infrastructure
- M.S./Ph.D. in Computer Science, Robotics, or related field, or equivalent (exceptional B.S. candidates considered)
- Experience architecting simulation or orchestration/configuration layers across a large codebase
- Experience building (tool selection, deployment, scaling) synthetic data and evaluation pipelines
- Working knowledge of AI development methods (data flywheels, eval-driven iteration)
- Comfort with ambiguity and evolving scopes
- Interest in safety-critical, regulated engineering
Bonus Qualifications:
- Neural rendering or generative AI for synthetic data (e.g. Gaussian Splatting)
- Integrating heterogeneous data (satellite, GIS, camera, telemetry)
- Simulation for embodied/physical AI (aerial, ground, indoor robotics)
- Flight dynamics / 6-DOF simulation or aerospace M&S tools (JSBSim, X-Plane, AirSim, Gazebo)
- Safety-critical or regulated engineering background (aerospace, automotive, medical devices)
About The Team:
The AI Products Org is a roughly 100-person software org inside a company of aerospace engineers, and we expect to grow substantially over the next year. You get the resources and momentum of a real org, but the products themselves are early. Much of what we're building isn't public yet - we'll share plenty of detail during the interview process.
At Archer we aim to attract, retain, and motivate talent that possess the skills and leadership necessary to grow our business. We drive a pay-for-performance culture and reward performance that supports the Company’s business strategy. For this position we are targeting a base pay between $195,00.00 - $235,000.00 . Actual compensation offered will be determined by factors such as job-related knowledge, skills, and experience.