Principal Engineer

About Foundry

Foundry is GreyOrange's platform for designing and validating automated warehouses. It lets teams go from an early concept to a fully validated solution before anything is built: they model flows, size equipment and robot fleets, lay out the warehouse, and simulate how it will perform. Discrete event simulation (DES) is at the heart of the platform. It lets engineers and customers test thousands of what-if scenarios in minutes instead of days.

About the Role

We are looking for a Principal Engineer to own the technical direction of our discrete event simulation engine. You will set the architecture and lead the engineering of a high-performance simulator for multi-agent warehouse robotics, and grow it into a fast, accurate, extensible product that customers and partners can build on.

This is a hands-on role. You will write core engine code, make the key architecture calls, and work closely with product, platform, and robotics teams. The aim is for simulation to be the trusted basis for high-stakes design and sizing decisions.

What You'll Do

Own the simulation architecture and roadmap

• Define the multi-year technical vision for the simulation engine and how it evolves to meet growing product needs.
• Make the core engine decisions: event scheduling, time management, deterministic replay, state representation, and scaling to large fleets and long simulated horizons.
• Serve as the final technical authority on simulation design, and represent it in platform-wide architecture reviews.

Build a world-class simulation core

• Lead development of a high-performance engine, with a focus on throughput, latency, and memory efficiency so that large parameter sweeps run quickly and cheaply.
• Model warehouse operations faithfully, including robot navigation and traffic, congestion and resource contention, charging, workstation behavior, and a range of picking and putaway workflows.
• Set fidelity standards and calibrate simulation results against higher-fidelity testing and real-world operational data, so customers can trust the output.

Make simulation an extensible, API-first product

• Design versioned, public schemas and APIs for simulation inputs, job control, real-time streaming, and results, so customers can integrate their own data sources and tools or run simulations headless.
• Build a secure plugin architecture so customers and partners can bring their own algorithms and strategies.
• Define validation rules that decide when a warehouse design has enough detail to simulate.

Integrate across the platform

• Work with platform teams on asynchronous job execution, cancellation, and multi-tenant scaling.
• Build the real-time and analytics data paths that power live visualization, sizing recommendations, and data-driven insights.
• Work with adjacent teams to decide when fast simulation is enough and when a scenario needs deeper, higher-fidelity validation.

Lead and raise the bar

• Mentor senior and staff engineers. Set standards for performance engineering, testing (determinism, regression, and golden-run suites), observability, and code quality.
• Write the design docs, specs, and RFCs that align multiple teams, and turn open architecture questions into decisions.
• Engage directly with solutions engineers and customers to understand how simulation drives their decisions, and feed that back into the roadmap.

What You Bring

Requirement

• 14+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 5 years leading the architecture of complex, performance-critical systems.
• Deep expertise in discrete event simulation: event-queue design, simulation clocks, stochastic modeling, determinism and reproducibility, and validating models against reality.
• Strong systems programming skills in Rust, with comfort in async runtimes and high-performance data structures. Working proficiency in Java or a similar JVM language.
• Experience modeling multi-agent systems such as robot fleets, vehicles, logistics networks, or manufacturing lines, including path planning, traffic and congestion, and resource contention.
• A track record of designing public, versioned APIs and schemas that external developers built on.
• Solid distributed-systems fundamentals: job queues, real-time streaming, service-to-service communication, and time-series and analytical data stores.
• The ability to drive alignment across several teams through clear writing and sound technical judgment.

Nice to have

• Experience with WebAssembly runtimes or other plugin and sandboxing architectures.
• Background in warehouse automation, AMRs/AGVs, goods-to-person systems, or material-handling simulation tools (e.g., AnyLogic, FlexSim, Simio, Demo3D).
• Experience with simulation frameworks such as DesmoJ or SimPy, or with custom simulation engines at scale.
• Experience running large simulation or optimization workloads on cloud infrastructure.
• Experience building multi-tenant SaaS products.
• Familiarity with operations research, queueing theory, or ML-assisted optimization.
• An advanced degree in Computer Science, Operations Research, Industrial Engineering, Robotics, or a related field.

What Success Looks Like

• First 90 days: You understand the current simulation platform, its fidelity gaps, and its performance limits. You have published a technical strategy and delivered early wins on performance or correctness.
• First 6–12 months: Public simulation schemas and extension interfaces are defined and versioned. Simulation runs as a scalable multi-tenant service. Results are calibrated against real-world data with published accuracy bounds.
• Long term: Simulation is the fast, trusted backbone of every design and sizing decision, and customers and partners extend it with their own algorithms and tools.

Why Join

• Shape a core product from the architecture up, at a point where the big decisions are still open.
• Work on hard problems where simulation science, systems performance, and robotics meet.
• See your work directly affect how some of the world's largest retailers and 3PLs design and run their warehouses.

Department

GreyMatter Engineering

Mandatory Skills

Software Engineer Staff,System Design,Distributed Systems,Java,High Level Design

Experience

14 to 25 years