Senior Asset Pipeline Engineer - Sensor Platform

About the role

Applied Intuition, Inc. is powering the future of physical AI. Founded in 2017 and now valued at $15 billion, the Silicon Valley company is creating the digital infrastructure needed to bring intelligence to every moving machine on the planet. Applied Intuition services the automotive, defense, trucking, construction, mining and agriculture industries in three core areas: tools and infrastructure, operating systems, and autonomy.

Eighteen of the top 20 global automakers, as well as the United States military and its allies, trust the company’s solutions to deliver physical intelligence. Applied Intuition is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, with offices in Washington, D.C.; San Diego; Ft. Walton Beach, Florida; Ann Arbor, Michigan; London; Stuttgart; Munich; Stockholm; Bangalore; Seoul; and Tokyo.

We are an in-office company, and our expectation is that full-time employees primarily work from their Applied Intuition office 5 days a week. However, we also recognize the importance of flexibility and trust our employees to manage their schedules responsibly. This may include occasional remote work, starting the day with morning meetings from home before heading to the office, or leaving earlier when needed to accommodate family commitments. This in-office expectation does not apply to contractor positions

About the Role

Applied Intuition's Sensor Simulation platform lets automotive and robotics customers validate their perception systems against high-fidelity, physically accurate simulated sensor data. Behind that platform is a large, growing library of 3D simulation assets - and the content pipeline that produces them. We are investing in the next generation of that pipeline, built on OpenUSD, so our asset library can scale and stay portable across the authoring tools and simulation engines our customers depend on.

We are looking for a Senior Asset Pipeline Engineer to design and own that pipeline - a senior individual-contributor role at the intersection of pipeline engineering, OpenUSD architecture, and simulation infrastructure. You will own the design end-to-end and make the core architecture decisions, partnering with our simulation and infrastructure teams to take the system from design through production.

At Applied Intuition, You Will

• Design the OpenUSD schema and composition strategy - references, variants, payloads, custom schemas - for a large, versioned 3D asset library that must scale across authoring tools and simulation engines
• Build and own automated pipelines that move assets between DCC tools and real-time/simulation engines, removing manual hand-offs
• Define automated validation gates that catch asset-integrity and fidelity issues in CI, before they reach production
• Solve material conversion for simulation: translate complex authored materials into USD-native representations (UsdShade, and MDL where needed) while preserving the physical fidelity sensor simulation requires - not just visual appearance
• Design the asset metadata strategy that powers discovery, semantic labeling, and downstream tooling
• Take the pipeline from design through production - observability, reliability, and a smooth experience for the content authors who depend on it

We're Looking for Someone Who Has

• Deep, practical OpenUSD composition expertise - references, variants, payloads, inherits, specializes - designing and debugging composition stacks, not just consuming USD files
• 3+ Years experience authoring and validating custom USD schemas (API and applied schemas)
• Strong UsdShade material expertise: authoring, validating, and converting complex material networks
• Built and owned automated DCC-to-engine pipelines in production - version-controlled Python that runs in CI, with real downstream users (not prototypes or research)
• Managed USD at library scale: versioning, identifier and namespace conventions, and validation across thousands of assets
• At minimum, a Bachelors degree in STEM or a related field.

Nice to Have

• NVIDIA Omniverse / Isaac Sim: Kit extensions (Python or C++), USD ingest, and Replicator / synthetic-data-generation pipelines
• Houdini LOPs: native USD authoring and procedural scene graphs - a strong signal for someone who thinks in USD
• MDL (Material Definition Language): physically-based material authoring and portability across renderers
• Sensor simulation domain knowledge: how material properties (reflectance, roughness, emissivity) drive lidar, radar, and camera outputs - beyond visual quality
• Automotive, defense, or robotics simulation experience: contexts where sensor fidelity matters beyond visual aesthetics (ROS 2 / scene assembly a plus)

Additional information

Don’t meet every single requirement? If you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyway. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.

For Us-based Roles

Applied Intuition is committed to providing an accessible and inclusive application and interview experience to applicants who are disabled veterans and other applicants with disabilities or medical conditions. If you require an accommodation please contact. We will work with you!