Principal Physics Engine Programmer, C++ (Modeling & Simulation)

ABOUT CODE METAL

Code Metal is the leader in automated software engineering you can trust. As AI writes more of the world's code, the bottleneck in software has shifted from writing code to verifying it works, and AI cannot verify its own work with certainty. Code Metal takes a fundamentally different approach: constrain AI to what it does reliably, verify every step independently of the model using formal methods, and keep engineers in the loop on the decisions that matter. The result isn't code that probably works — it's code that is provably correct, with auditable proof. Customers including the U.S. Air Force, L3Harris, RTX, and Toshiba use Code Metal to modernize legacy code, optimize performance on real hardware, and move prototypes to production, fast. Founded in 2023 with offices in Boston and San Francisco, Code Metal is funded by Accel, Salesforce Ventures, B Capital, Smith Point Capital, J2 Ventures, Shield Capital, Overmatch, RTX, and others.

Learn more at codemetal.ai http://codemetal.ai.

ABOUT THE ROLE:

Our Modeling & Simulation team is building the next-generation wargaming and decision-support platform that helps the DoW make multi-billion-dollar force-design decisions before those decisions are made in the real world. The team spans simulation and physics, backend and data systems, frontend and geospatial visualization, and AI systems, working together to turn operational questions into extensible, mission- and campaign-level simulations that government users can trust.

Help redefine how the DoW makes multi-billion-dollar force-design decisions. We're looking for a Physics Engine Programmer to bring the performance standards of commercial game development to our next-generation wargaming platform. You'll architect and build the core C++ simulation runtime that executes physics, behavior, and mission models developed by engineers and domain experts across the organization. Scope of ownership, architectural authority, and mentorship responsibility scale with level — see “Level Expectations by Track” below.

Your work will span entity-component systems, data-oriented architecture, simulation scheduling, concurrency, deterministic execution, memory management, model integration, and engine-wide performance. The strongest candidates will come from commercial game development, game-engine development, or another performance-constrained real-time environment where frame time, memory, latency, stability, and hardware limitations are non-negotiable. You may have built a custom physics engine, owned core systems within a proprietary engine, or developed low-level physics and runtime infrastructure for a major game platform.

Defense experience is not required. We care more about whether you have shipped real-time C++ systems, optimized them under hard performance budgets, and made foundational architectural decisions within a complex engine codebase.

WHAT YOU’LL DO:

• Architect and implement the core C++ runtime behind a large-scale, interactive wargaming platform.

• Own the structure, performance, and long-term health of a substantial engine codebase.

• Design and evolve an entity-component-system architecture for representing large numbers of heterogeneous simulation entities.

• Build data-oriented component storage, entity lifecycle management, system queries, execution graphs, and dependency-aware scheduling.

• Define the engine interfaces through which physics, AI, sensor, weapon, behavior, and environmental models are registered and executed.

• Create stable extension points that allow model developers to add capabilities without modifying or destabilizing the engine core.

• Design simulation loops, fixed and variable time stepping, event processing, system ordering, state transitions, and deterministic replay.

• Develop multithreaded and task-based execution systems that safely parallelize simulation workloads.

• Optimize memory layout, allocation, cache locality, component access, seriali