Modeling and Simulation Engineer - Encounter & Environment

About the Team

The Seeker Team builds the eyes and the targeting logic of our weapon system: a low-cost, mass-producible, multimodal missile seeker that leans on commercial supply chains where they outperform, and vertically integrates wherever possible. On a modern missile, the seeker is 40 to 60% of unit cost and often drives overly long delivery cycles; accordingly, the seeker team is at the tip of the spear for delivering capability to our customers and value to the taxpayer.

Seeker design has exactly two real constraints: physics and mission. Nothing else is a show-stopper, only an obstacle to overcome. We are a small, deeply technical team that drives capability through ingenuity and bias for action and ships hardware that flies. This is a wear-many-hats environment where you must be comfortable "building the airplane in flight" and stepping well outside your comfort zone; a narrowly scoped role with clean handoffs is not what this team offers.

This is an AI-native team. Through fluent use of cutting-edge agentic coding tools, one engineer here consistently out-delivers a much larger conventional team. You will have opinions about where these tools help and where they do not, provide governance input, and build out an AI-centric workflow from day one.

About the Role

You build the worlds this seeker trains and fights in. World building and encounter building are the job: the environments (terrain, atmosphere, backgrounds, clutter) and the encounters staged in them (targets, kinematics, countermeasures, timelines). The scenario space is your product, constructed deliberately for coverage, so the algorithms team never discovers a gap the hard way. Physics correctness of the world belongs to the modeling and simulation engineer; rendering it at volume belongs to the Seeker Data and Tooling Engineer; what worlds and encounters exist is yours.

What You'll Do

• Build environments: terrain from real geospatial data, atmospheres, backgrounds, and clutter representative of the mission set.

• Build encounters: target sets, kinematics and behaviors, countermeasure employment, and engagement timelines.

• Make it procedural: thousands of coherent variants per scenario family, not ten hand-built showpieces.

• Own coverage as a product: the corpus spans aspect angles, ranges, conditions, and countermeasures by design, with gaps found by you first.

• Set the field data collection matrix: which real-world conditions get collected, and why.

• Deliver encounter sets to HWIL and evaluation, versioned and reproducible.

• Work the physics seam: your worlds carry the modeling and simulation engineer's sign-off.

Skills We're Hiring For

• B.S. in Engineering, Computer Science, Physics, or related.

• 5+ years building synthetic environments or scenarios: game, simulation, autonomous vehicle, or defense.

• Hands-on work in Unreal, Unity, or Blender, or an equivalent, including C++ or C# scripting for Unreal or Unity.

• Procedural generation fluency: parameterized worlds, seeded variation, reproducible builds.

• Geospatial data craft: DTED, imagery, and map projections, with careful handling of coordinate systems.

• Modern Python; reviewable, repeatable pipelines.

• Working knowledge of CI/CD pipelines and Git version control.

Bonus Points For

• IR scene generation or EO/IR sensor simulation.

• Countermeasure modeling.

• 6-DOF trajectory and kinematics modeling.

• Military operational background or wargaming and scenario design.

• Hands-on work in a scene and encounter framework such as DIRSIG or FLITES, or an equivalent.

• Daily use of agentic coding tools (Claude Code or similar) to multiply your output, with examples of what you've shipped.

• Rust programming experience.

• Target and threat behavior literacy, enough to stage realistic encounters.