Senior Asset Pipeline Engineer - Sensor Platform

Responsibilities

• Design the OpenUSD schema and composition strategy, including references, variants, payloads, and custom schemas, for a large-scale 3D asset library.
• Build and own automated pipelines to move assets between DCC tools and simulation engines, eliminating manual hand-offs.
• Define automated validation gates within CI to catch asset-integrity and fidelity issues before production.
• Solve material conversion challenges by translating complex authored materials into USD-native representations (UsdShade, MDL) while preserving physical fidelity.
• Design asset metadata strategies to power discovery, semantic labeling, and downstream tooling.
• Manage the end-to-end pipeline lifecycle, ensuring observability, reliability, and a smooth experience for content authors.

Requirements

• Deep, practical OpenUSD composition expertise (references, variants, payloads, inherits, specializes) and experience debugging composition stacks.
• Experience authoring and validating custom USD schemas (API and applied schemas).
• Strong UsdShade material expertise, including authoring, validating, and converting complex material networks.
• Proven track record of building and owning automated DCC-to-engine pipelines in production using version-controlled Python.
• Experience managing USD at library scale, including versioning, identifier/namespace conventions, and validation across thousands of assets.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with NVIDIA Omniverse / Isaac Sim, including Kit extensions and Replicator pipelines.
• Proficiency with Houdini LOPs for native USD authoring and procedural scene graphs.
• Knowledge of MDL (Material Definition Language) for physically-based material portability.
• Domain knowledge in sensor simulation, specifically how material properties drive lidar, radar, and camera outputs.
• Experience in automotive, defense, or robotics simulation environments.

About the Company

Applied Intuition is powering the future of physical AI. Founded in 2017, we are creating the digital infrastructure needed to bring intelligence to every moving machine on the planet. We service the automotive, defense, trucking, construction, mining, and agriculture industries, providing essential tools and operating systems for autonomy.