Senior Robotics Simulation Engineer

We're automating homebuilding. Construction is one of the least automated industries in the world, and homes are still built largely by hand, in slow, expensive and fragmented processes. AUAR is a physical AI and robotics company changing that.

Our software platform, Master Builder, turns a building design into the instructions needed to manufacture a home's timber structure. Our robotic Micro Factory then deploys directly onto a home builder's site and produces the wall, floor and roof panels they need, on demand. It arrives in a shipping container, sits on a footprint of max 30 by 30 ft and runs off generators on a gravel pad: no grid connection, no permanent site works.

We own and run the equipment, our customers buy the panels it produces, not the machine.

We're past pure R&D and shipping our first commercial Micro Factories this year, across the UK, Europe and North America. Backed by Planet A, PT1, Shadow Ventures and ABB Robotics, we're a team of around 35 engineers, roboticists, operators and designers working from an 11,000 sq ft R&D and demonstration facility in London. The systems we build now will decide how homes are manufactured at scale.

We're looking for a Senior Robotics Simulation Engineer to own and advance the simulation capability for our robotic Micro Factory.

Simulation is how we develop an increasingly complex robotic manufacturing system without being blocked on one physical machine. You'll own our physics-based environment in NVIDIA Isaac Sim and everything around it: digital twins of the robotic cell, CAD and USD asset pipelines, physics and control modelling, ROS 2 integration and automated test scenarios. The hardware keeps changing underneath you, so keeping the digital and physical systems aligned is permanent, not a setup phase.

This is a senior IC role with real technical ownership. You'll define the engineering approach, make the calls on fidelity and architecture, and work with robotics software, controls, integration, test and mechanical engineering to find where simulation actually has leverage. You'll also make it something the team can use, not something only you can run.

• Simulation architecture - Own and evolve our Isaac Sim environment so it stays reliable, maintainable and usable across robotics development.
• Digital twins and asset pipelines - Keep models of robots, tooling and the wider cell physically representative as the hardware changes, with robust workflows for taking engineering geometry into USD.
• Physics that matches reality - Tune contacts, friction, joints, actuators and sensors for stable, useful behaviour, and diagnose where simulation diverges from the machine.
• ROS 2 integration - Own the interface so robotics software runs against simulated and physical systems through consistent abstractions.
• Virtual development and automated testing - Build scenarios that exercise behaviours, changes and failure conditions repeatedly, and turn them into tests that live in the robotics CI workflow.
• Sim-to-real - Find the discrepancies between simulated and real Micro Factory behaviour that actually affect engineering decisions, and close them.
• Data for what comes next - Version simulation runs as usable data, and generate synthetic training data with domain randomisation to support computer-vision development.

• In your first weeks, you're running the existing environment yourself, finding where it diverges from the physical Micro Factory, and forming a view on where simulation has the most leverage.
• Within your first month, another engineer can run a useful scenario without you configuring it for them.
• Within two months, there's a clear technical direction: what gets modelled, to what fidelity, and how it stays aligned as hardware changes.
• Simulation is routinely used to develop, test and make engineering decisions, not to produce demos.
• The environment keeps pace with changing hardware and software without becoming fragile or expensive to maintain.
• You know when fidelity is enough to answer the question and when physical testing is still required, and you don't gold-plate.

You're a senior robotics or simulation engineer who has built simulation environments for complex physical systems, and you know the gap between a simulation that looks convincing and one that is useful for engineering. You've worked where software, controls, mechanical systems, sensing and physics all interact, and you're comfortable going deep into a physics…