- Salary
- Not published
- Location
- Bay Area
- Work type
- On-site
- Posted
- today
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Apply on company site (opens in new tab) ](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/genesis/a99e725f-fa13-4f41-9ffc-3ad6305eb4e1/application)
What we're building
Robots will learn in simulation before they hit the factory. Genesis-World is our bet on that future.
Genesis-World is an open-source, general-purpose simulation platform for physical AI from Genesis AI . One unified multi-physics engine: rigid bodies, FEM, MPM, particles, cloth, fluids. A robot arm can pour water onto sand, grasp a deformable object, or cut a soft body, all in the same simulation. Nyx, our in-house renderer, may be the most promising renderer for robotics out there: real-time photo-realistic rendering, advanced features like depth of field, and state-of-the-art techniques never seen before. Sensors of every kind: cameras, lidar, IMU, contact forces, temperature, plus arguably the most advanced tactile simulation available ( paper ). And the engine keeps growing: we are developing internally the most comprehensive and fastest Incremental Potential Contact ( paper ) solver for deformable body dynamics we know of, soon to be open-sourced. It powers real business applications, from full-fledged box packaging with labelling machine and all, to wire harnessing and lab automation, without any physics hack or compromise.
Everything is Python-first and runs anywhere. Kernels are written once, and Quadrants, our in-house JIT compiler, lowers them to CUDA, AMD ROCm, Apple Metal, Vulkan, x86, and ARM64. A single laptop or a datacenter. Massively batched GPU simulation for learning at scale, and complex non-batched scenes where CPU wins outright.
This is at the core of Genesis AI's strategy . Evaluation is the bottleneck of scalable robotics: real hardware caps iteration at wall-clock time, but simulation turns it into a compute problem. Ours already runs two orders of magnitude faster than hardware (tens of thousands of episodes in half an hour instead of 200+ hours), while correlating with on-hardware rollouts at 89%. The north star: physical AI that improves at the speed of compute.
The role
You push the physics of Genesis-World forward. The mandate is clear: ship production-ready simulation capabilities that matter for the company's internal needs. Research applied end-to-end, from algorithm to merged, tested, documented code that real robot-learning pipelines depend on. Occasional groundbreaking research happens, notably through academic collaborations. But the core of the job is making the engine measurably better along five axes:
- Speed. Algorithms that are not only faster but also smart enough to spend compute only where it matters across both time and space: larger stable timesteps, selective fidelity (adaptive across scales or simply hand-set), structure-aware solvers.
- Completeness. No physics off limits: water, human animation, air flow, gravel, tendons, even body organs. Whatever the next use-case needs, the engine grows to cover it.
- Fidelity. More realistic models: contact, friction, deformation, energy, actuation, materials…
- Versatility. Extensible multi-physics without compromise on realism: all solvers in the scene coupled together at once, two-way and constraint-based. Write your own solver and it joins the scene like a native one, growing into an open solver ecosystem.
- Scalability. From workstation to factory scale, and one day, city scale: thousands of interacting entities, batched across environments, without losing physical soundness.
Our ambition is to establish Genesis-World as the go-to simulator for physical AI, from companies and research labs to individuals.
The problems waiting for you
- Every fidelity for every physics. The same physics at every point of the speed-accuracy spectrum, from heavily batched training with XPBD or VBD to final validation with IPC. Same scene, same API, pick your tradeoff.
- Invent physics level-of-detail (LOD). Rendering has had LOD for decades, physics is still waiting. Simulate at full fidelity what agents interact with and see, coarsely what they do not.
- Heterogeneous environments. Every parallel world can hold a completely different model: different bodies, joints, and collision geometries.
- Adaptive timesteps per island. Error-based control with Runge-Kutta Dopri5, and Time-of-Impact stepping during collision detection, as done in Jiminy.
- Couple everything, exactly. Efficient and accurate two-way constraint-based coupling between heterogeneous grey-box solvers, using state-of-the-art methods like ADMM. Owning every solver in the stack is what makes it possible.
- More scalable constraint solvers. Push rigid constraint solving beyond its current scalability ceiling ( reference ).
- Unify contact resolution. Hydro-elastic compliance, unilateral constraints, and sequential impulses in the same framework, ideally under one generic formulation.
- Closed kinematic loops without constraints. Handle loops intrinsically for numerical stability and speed, in the spirit of Kamino .
Day to day: you write your physics in plain Python and Quadrants makes it fast on every backend. And you validate it the hard way: analytical closed forms, other engines, real-world data.
Who you are
You are a physicist and an engineer at once. You judge a method by whether it holds up in production at real scale, and you do not stop until it does. No blind spots: you relentlessly hunt down even the defect that looks insignificant, because it never is.
- A strong background in physics-based simulation, preferably related to robotics: RBD, FEM, MPM, SPH, IPC, XPBD, VBD, ABD, plus constrained optimization and numerical integration of stiff systems.
- A track record of shipping simulation code that others rely on, in an engine, in industry, or in a research codebase used beyond its authors.
- Solid HPC programming (CPU and/or GPU), and an instinct for what makes a numerical method fast in practice, beyond complexity classes.
- Rigor in validation: analytical closed forms, cross-engine consistency, real-world data.
Bonus points: publications in simulation, graphics, or robotics venues (SIGGRAPH, ICRA, IROS, CoRL, RSS). Contributions to an open-source physics engine.