Apptronik is a human-centered robotics company developing AI-powered robots to support humanity in every facet of life. Our flagship humanoid robot, Apollo, is built to collaborate thoughtfully with people, starting with critical industries such as manufacturing and logistics, with future applications in healthcare, the home, and beyond.
We operate at the cutting edge of embodied AI, applying our expertise across the full robotics stack to solve some of society's most important problems. You will join a team dedicated to bringing Apollo to market at scale, tackling the complex challenges like safety, commercialization, and mass production to change the world for the better.
The Role
Apptronik is seeking a visionary
Senior Engineering Manager – Hardware Simulation to architect, scale, and lead our centralized Hardware Simulation Center of Excellence. As the strategic leader of this department, you will define how Apptronik leverages advanced predictive physics to accelerate the development, safety, and reliability of the Apollo humanoid robot.
At the Senior Manager level, you are not just building a team; you are driving a multi-year digital transformation. You will shift the enterprise engineering culture from a reactive "build and test" loop to a proactive "simulate, predict, and validate" methodology. You will manage a large, multi-disciplinary team of simulation experts, own the software and High-Performance Computing (HPC) budgets, and align the simulation roadmap with the company's broader commercial and hardware milestones. Your leadership will ensure that complex, coupled-physics problems—spanning structural, thermal, kinematic, and eventually electronic domains—are mathematically optimized well before physical prototypes are built.
Key Responsibilities
Department Leadership & Strategy
- Organizational Scaling: Build and scale the Hardware Simulation department. Define the multi-year headcount roadmap, recruit top-tier PhD and MS-level talent, and establish an organizational structure that supports rapid hardware iterations (including appointing and managing domain-specific technical leads).
- Cultural Transformation: Drive the adoption of "simulation-driven design" across the entire hardware organization. Partner directly with executive leadership (VPs, Directors) to embed simulation milestones as mandatory gates in the product development lifecycle.
- Budget & Resource Allocation: Own the department budget. Triage enterprise-wide simulation requests and allocate resources strategically to ensure your team acts as a high-ROI accelerator for the company's most critical path items.
Enterprise Architecture & HPC Infrastructure
- HPC & Toolchain Ownership: Architect the company's simulation infrastructure. Lead the evaluation, procurement, and enterprise-level negotiation for industry-leading solvers (e.g., Ansys, Abaqus, Altair, Star-CCM+, Adams). Define and deploy the High-Performance Computing (HPC) strategy, balancing on-premise clusters with cloud-bursting capabilities.
- Methodology & Standardization: Establish and enforce strict company-wide Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for meshing, boundary conditions, and material libraries to ensure enterprise-grade accuracy and repeatability across all analyses.
- V&V and Test Correlation: Forge a tight, strategic partnership with the Hardware Test & Reliability organization. Ensure all simulation models are rigorously correlated with empirical lab data, utilizing simulation to eventually satisfy formal Verification and Validation (V&V) and safety certification requirements.
Multi-Physics Roadmap & Oversight
- Advanced Structural Dynamics: Direct the strategy for analyzing highly dynamic, non-linear events, such as high-energy impacts (falls), severe high-cycle fatigue, and generative mass optimization for the robot's skeletal structure.
- Coupled Thermal-Fluid Systems: Oversee the advanced CFD and transient thermal modeling strategies required to cool dense, high-power compute clusters and tightly packaged, high-torque actuators.
- Robotics & Multi-Body Dynamics: Guide the kinematic simulation roadmap to validate joint loads, complex actuator sizing, and dynamic balancing during aggressive humanoid maneuvers.
- Electronic Simulation Expansion: Define the strategic roadmap and hiring plan to bring advanced electronic simulation in-house, establishing capabilities in Signal Integrity (SI), Power Integrity (PI), and system-level EMI/EMC compliance.
Qualifications
- Experience: 12+ years of engineering experience in complex electromechanical product development, with 5+ years of leadership experience managing high-performing simulation, CAE, or analysis departments.
- Technical Breadth & Depth: Deep, hands-on subject matter expertise in at least one primary domain (Structural FEA, Thermal/CFD, or Multi-Body Dynamics), with a strong capability to review and challenge assumptions in highly coupled multi-physics problems.
- Industry Background: Proven track record in Robotics, Aerospace, Automotive/EV, or advanced Defense hardware, where extreme constraints on mass, thermal dissipation, and dynamic loading are the norm.
- Infrastructure & Vendor Management: Proven experience managing multi-million dollar software budgets, negotiating enterprise licenses, and architecting scalable HPC environments.
- Strategic Vision & Influence: Demonstrated ability to drive organizational change. You can effectively communicate the ROI of simulation to executive leadership and influence upstream design teams to utilize predictive models.
- Education: MS or PhD in Mechanical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, Robotics, or a related field.
PHYSICAL REQUIREMENTS
- Prolonged periods of sitting at a desk and working on a computer
- Must be able to lift 15 pounds at times
- Vision to read printed materials and a computer screen
- Hearing and speech to communicate
- This is a direct hire. Please, no outside Agency solicitations.
Apptronik provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.
