Robotics Simulation Engineer

About Us

Amidon Heavy Industries is a startup building unmanned systems for the offshore industry. We develop uncrewed surface vessels (USVs) that autonomously deploy tethered remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) to inspect subsea pipelines, telecom cables, and offshore infrastructure. Our goal is to deliver reliable subsea awareness at a fraction of the cost of traditional crewed vessels.

The Role

We are hiring a Software Simulation Engineer to develop and maintain the simulation environments that power development and testing of our marine robotics platform. You will help turn a proven autonomous surface vessel prototype into a product-ready system by building high-fidelity simulations of the vessel, its sensors, and its operating environment. This role sits at the intersection of software, autonomy, and marine operations: you will create tools that allow us to iterate quickly, test safely, and validate behavior before going to sea. You will work closely with other engineers on autonomy, perception, and controls to ensure our simulation stack accurately reflects real-world marine conditions and scales with the complexity of the platform.

Responsibilities:

• Design, implement, and maintain simulation environments for an autonomous surface vessel, including vessel dynamics, propulsion, and environmental effects (waves, wind, currents)

• Build and refine simulated sensor models (sonar, acoustic, visual, GPS, IMU, radar, etc.) to support realistic perception and navigation testing

• Develop ROS2-based interfaces to simulation environments, including nodes, plugins, and bridges that connect simulation to the autonomy stack

• Create tools for scenario authoring, automated test case generation, and batch simulation runs for regression and performance testing

• Contribute to data visualization, logging, and playback tools to analyze simulated and real-world runs side by side

• Occasionally support at-sea trials to collect data, validate simulation models, and close the loop between sim and reality

Qualifications:

• Degree in Robotics, Computer Science, Mechatronics, or related field

• 1–3 years of experience (or equivalent project work) in robotics simulation, autonomy testing, or related software development

• Proficiency in C++ and Python in a Linux environment

• Experience with modern robotics middleware, specifically ROS2 (nodes, messages, services/actions, launch systems, and tooling)

• Hands-on experience with at least one simulation or visualization platform (e.g., Gazebo/Ignition, Webots, Unity, Unreal Engine)

• Familiarity with modeling and simulating sensors (e.g., cameras, lidar, sonar, GNSS, IMU) and understanding their data characteristics

Bonus Points:

• Background in marine or maritime engineering, naval architecture, or marine robotics

• Experience modeling sonar and acoustic sensors or working with underwater/near-surface sensing systems

• Experience with modern visualization tools and workflows (RViz, custom dashboards, or game-engine-based visualizations)

• Familiarity with embedded operating systems and edge-compute platforms (e.g., NVIDIA Jetson, real-time or resource-constrained systems)

• Experience building or using hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) or software-in-the-loop (SIL) test setups