Simulation Software Engineer | Unreal / Omniverse / Isaac Sim | Central Bristol

A fast-growing defence technology business in central Bristol is hiring a Simulation Software Engineer to own its high-performance simulation and test infrastructure.

The team is developing a reusable kinetic interceptor UAS, designed to physically engage a target and return to base. This is an end-to-end ownership role across the full simulation pipeline: from photorealistic environments and sensor simulation through to cloud-scale automated testing and Hardware-in-the-Loop.

You will work closely with Robotics, Perception, Aero, and Data engineers, and the core aim is simple: validate hardware and software continuously, so a vehicle only leaves the ground when it is ready.

What you will do

• Own the architecture and build of photorealistic virtual environments in Unreal Engine 5, NVIDIA Omniverse / Isaac Sim, or a comparable real-time engine
• Build 1-to-1 digital twins of test sites from real flight-test footage, using techniques such as NeRFs and Gaussian Splatting
• Work with Perception to simulate complex thermal and IR sensors and automate synthetic data generation pipelines
• Containerise the simulation (Docker) and stand up the backend for cloud deployment, so Data/ML and Aero can run thousands of headless, multi-agent scenarios in parallel
• Connect simulation to real flight controllers on HIL benches and validate sensor-to-actuator latency
• Integrate flight dynamics models into the engine without sacrificing execution speed
• Build frontend tools so the wider engineering team can visualise telemetry, scrub data replays, and debug complex intercept failures