Six Figure Work

MTS - Research (Robotics Simulation Data)

Collinear

Company websitecollinear.ai (Collinear, opens in new tab)

Base salary $160K  to $400K

Employer-published annual base salary, USD. Advertised base range in Sunnyvale, CA

Apply (opens in new tab)

You apply on the employer's own site. Six Figure Work does not handle applications.

  • LocationSunnyvale, CA
  • WorkplaceWorkplace not stated
  • Status at last checkSource accepting applications when checked
  • Last checked (2 h ago) · observed since

About this job

Position Overview

We are seeking an Applied Scientist (Robotics Simulation) to design and build the physics-solving engine behind Collinear’s synthetic data generation platform. In this role, you will architect and optimize a next-generation simulation stack engineered purely for maximum data throughput, procedural environmental scale, and physical fidelity.

You will collaborate closely with GPU optimization engineers, procedural scene generation teams, and AI researchers pushing the limits of model training on synthetic data. The ideal candidate brings deep physics simulation expertise and hands-on experience implementing high-performance solvers on modern parallel GPU architectures.

Key Responsibilities

  • Physics Solver Innovation: Improve and develop advanced physics solvers and numerical modeling methods for high-degree-of-freedom interactions, complex contact dynamics, deformables, and fluids.

  • Training Data Optimization: Partner with team members to design simulation environments, domain randomization strategies, and physics parameter ranges that yield high-utility training datasets for downstream AI models.

  • Procedural Scene & Scale Integration: Collaborate with scene-generation engineers to scale environment variations, physical property distributions, and dynamic multi-agent interactions across billions of simulation steps.

  • Performance Profiling: Profile and optimize simulation execution at scale, minimizing latency and memory overhead in multi-GPU, parallelized rollout pipelines.

  • Technical Leadership: Help shape Collinear’s long-term roadmap for high-fidelity physical modeling, differentiable simulation, and synthetic data engine architecture.

Preferred Qualifications

  • Education: MS or PhD in Physics, Computer Science, Applied Math, Engineering, or equivalent hands-on industry experience in physics-based simulation.

  • Physics Engine Expertise: Strong track record of developing or extending high-fidelity physics engines, rigid-body dynamics solvers, or constraint-based systems. Experience with deformables, fluids, soft bodies, or differentiable simulation is a plus.

  • Numerical Methods & Dynamics: Deep understanding of classical mechanics, contact modeling, constraint solvers, integrators, and managing accuracy-vs-speed trade-offs for large-scale computation.

  • GPU Programming: Advanced expertise in CUDA and GPU optimization, with a proven ability to accelerate numerical algorithms on parallel hardware architectures.

  • Systems Engineering: High proficiency in C++ and Python, with a track record of building reliable, high-throughput software used in production data or ML pipelines.

  • ML Infrastructure Familiarity: Strong grasp of how ML frameworks consume simulation outputs (e.g., vectorized environments, massively parallel rollouts, synthetic dataset generation).

  • Fidelity Intuition: Deep intuition for physical realism and dataset distribution drift—understanding how synthetic physical data behaves and how to model environmental variance without relying on physical hardware collection.

  • Track Record: Publications, open-source contributions, or shipped commercial systems in numerical computing, graphics, physics simulation, or synthetic data generation.

Source: Collinear on Ashby · View original posting (opens in new tab)

Pay in context

This role's base floor ($160,000) is above 68% of the 977 Science & Research roles nationwide listed on this site; 8 others list the same floor. Their median floor is $139,600; the middle half runs from $117,000 to $169,320.

Only jobs on this site count, and each one publishes a base salary of $100,000 or more, so this compares six-figure jobs with each other, not with the whole market. Computed Nov 7, 2026.

This range next to 5 other live Collinear roles with the nearest advertised base floor
Chart as a table
This range next to 5 other live Collinear roles with the nearest advertised base floor
RolePublished base
MTS - Research (Robotics Simulation Data) (this listing)$160K - $400K
MTS - Research$160K - $400K
MTS - Research (Kernels & Hardware RL)$160K - $400K
MTS - Product$150K - $400K
MTS - Engineering$150K - $300K
MTS - Staff Engineer$200K - $400K

Same $100K to $400K scale as every card. All Collinear roles · How to read the bar

Observed changes

  1. First observed on the employer's board
  2. Began meeting the published-salary criteria
Observed since
Employer-stated posting date
2026-09-16
Where this pay comes from

Location as the employer wrote it: Sunnyvale, California

USD 160,000 – 400,000 · 1 YEAR · Salary

Method
Structured pay field published by the employer
Checked
Rule set
us-base-v2

The employer's job board publishes this pay as a dedicated data field. We read the field directly; no interpretation was needed.

What we verified

  • The pay figures come from the employer's own listing, quoted exactly above.
  • The pay is an annual base salary in US dollars with a minimum of at least $100,000.
  • The role was publicly listed on the employer's job board when last checked.

We do not verify what the employer will actually offer, whether the employer is still recruiting for the role, or anything beyond what the employer published. Full methodology.