Principal Physics Programmer, C++ (Modeling & Simulation)
Code Metal4 hours ago
Remote, United StatesStaff+
Responsibilities
- Architect and implement the core C++ runtime for a large-scale interactive wargaming platform.
- Own the structure, performance, and long-term health of the engine codebase.
- Design entity-component-system architecture, data-oriented storage, entity lifecycle management, queries, execution graphs, and dependency-aware scheduling.
- Build interfaces and extension points for physics, AI, sensor, weapon, behavior, and environmental models.
- Design simulation loops, time stepping, event processing, deterministic replay, multithreaded execution, and task-based parallelism.
- Optimize memory layout, allocation, cache locality, serialization, CPU utilization, latency, throughput, and simulation rate.
- Develop spatial indexing, collision-candidate, visibility, and proximity-query infrastructure.
- Integrate externally developed physics and mathematical models into the runtime.
- Build checkpointing, snapshotting, state replication, save-and-restore, and reproducible replay systems.
- Establish architecture for networked and distributed simulation, including synchronization, prediction, and state transfer.
- Develop tooling for entity inspection, system debugging, profiling, and simulation-state analysis.
- Lead engine design reviews, mentor programmers, conduct implementation and code reviews, and remain hands-on with profiling and debugging.
Requirements
- 10+ years of experience for the Principal level.
- Extensive professional C++ development experience or equivalent experience building performance-critical production software.
- Significant experience in commercial game development, game-engine development, or a similarly performance-constrained real-time environment.
- At least one shipped commercial game, engine, platform, or interactive real-time product.
- Ownership of foundational engine systems rather than primarily gameplay, scripting, tools, or application integrations.
- Experience building or substantially extending a physics engine, game engine, simulation runtime, ECS, job system, or comparable core technology.
- Expert command of modern C++, including object lifetimes, ownership, templates, concurrency, synchronization, profiling, and low-level debugging.
- Strong understanding of data-oriented design, memory layout, cache behavior, allocation strategies, and performance-sensitive data structures.
- Experience designing or extending an entity-component system or comparable composition-based runtime architecture.
- Experience with engine loops, execution graphs, task systems, event systems, dependency management, or runtime scheduling.
- Demonstrated ability to optimize against hard CPU, memory, latency, and frame- or tick-time budgets.
- Experience using commercial profiling and debugging tools to diagnose CPU stalls, memory issues, thread contention, allocation problems, and cache inefficiencies.
- Working knowledge of real-time physics concepts including coordinate systems, numerical integration, collision detection, spatial partitioning, constraints, and simulation stability.
- Experience designing APIs, plugin systems, SDKs, or extension frameworks used by other programmers.
- Experience maintaining and improving a large C++ codebase while delivering production capabilities.
- Experience leading major technical initiatives while remaining an active individual contributor.
- Active Secret clearance or eligibility to obtain one.
- Preferred experience with SIMD, GPU compute, custom allocators, job systems, lock-free structures, or platform-specific optimization.
- Preferred experience with very large worlds or simulations containing large numbers of active entities, engine-level serialization, snapshotting, replay, world partitioning, or streaming.
- Preferred familiarity with aerospace, robotics, autonomy, and defense simulations, including HLA, DIS, OneSAF, JSAF, NGTS, STK, or AFISM.
- Preferred experience supporting Air Force, Space Force, joint, or broader DoW acquisition and mission-analysis programs.
- Preferred experience developing sensor, weapon, electronic warfare, jamming, communications, logistics, or command-and-control models.
- Preferred active U.S. security clearance at the Secret, Top Secret, or SCI/SAP level.
Benefits
- Health care plan with 100% premium coverage for medical, dental, and vision.
- 401(k) with 5% matching.
- Uncapped vacation, sick leave, and public holidays.
- Flexible hybrid or remote work arrangement.
- Relocation assistance for qualifying employees.
- Pay is intended to be at the upper end of the salary range, with final compensation varying by proficiency, skills, experience, and location.
Tech Stack
Categories
Gaming
About Code Metal
Code Metal builds an AI-assisted code transpilation and verification platform that translates algorithms into optimized implementations for heterogeneous hardware (GPUs, FPGAs, ASICs, and edge SoCs). It serves defense, automotive, aerospace, and semiconductor teams deploying DSP, RF, communications, and embedded signal-processing workloads to constrained devices. Privately held and founded in 2023, the company is headquartered in Boston, MA.