# Senior Asset Pipeline Engineer

**Company:** [Applied Intuition](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/applied-intuition)
**Location:** Sunnyvale, CA
**Role:** DevOps / SRE
**Salary:** $151k – $230k/yr
**Experience:** 5+ years
**Skills:** Openusd, Usd Composition, Usdshade, Python, CI/CD, Dcc Pipelines, Nvidia Omniverse, Houdini Lops, Mdl, Ros 2
**Posted:** 2026-06-11

> Design and own the OpenUSD-based asset pipeline for a high-fidelity sensor simulation platform. Build automated DCC-to-engine pipelines, custom schemas, material conversion, and validation systems at library scale.

## Job Description

## Responsibilities
- Design the OpenUSD schema and composition strategy — references, variants, payloads, custom schemas — for a large, versioned 3D asset library that must scale across authoring tools and simulation engines
- Build and own automated pipelines that move assets between DCC tools and real-time/simulation engines, removing manual hand-offs
- Define automated validation gates that catch asset-integrity and fidelity issues in CI, before they reach production
- Solve material conversion for simulation: translate complex authored materials into USD-native representations (UsdShade, and MDL where needed) while preserving the physical fidelity sensor simulation requires
- Design the asset metadata strategy that powers discovery, semantic labeling, and downstream tooling
- Take the pipeline from design through production — observability, reliability, and a smooth experience for the content authors who depend on it

## Requirements
- Deep, practical OpenUSD composition expertise — references, variants, payloads, inherits, specializes — designing and debugging composition stacks
- Experience authoring and validating custom USD schemas (API and applied schemas)
- Strong UsdShade material expertise: authoring, validating, and converting complex material networks
- Built and owned automated DCC-to-engine pipelines in production — version-controlled Python that runs in CI, with real downstream users
- Managed USD at library scale: versioning, identifier and namespace conventions, and validation across thousands of assets

## Nice-to-Haves
- NVIDIA Omniverse / Isaac Sim: Kit extensions (Python or C++), USD ingest, and Replicator / synthetic-data-generation pipelines
- Houdini LOPs: native USD authoring and procedural scene graphs
- MDL (Material Definition Language): physically-based material authoring and portability across renderers
- Sensor simulation domain knowledge: how material properties (reflectance, roughness, emissivity) drive lidar, radar, and camera outputs
- Automotive, defense, or robotics simulation experience: contexts where sensor fidelity matters beyond visual aesthetics (ROS 2 / scene assembly a plus)

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