
Software Engineer – Simulation Backend at Avride (Austin, TX)
Avride· Austin, TX·
Job description
About the team
Our Simulation team is responsible for building the foundational infrastructure that powers large-scale simulations critical to autonomous system development. We work at the intersection of cloud computing, distributed systems, and core simulation. Our simulations are used daily across the company: by QA engineers verifying component-level quality, by autonomy engineers investigating unexpected behavior, by ML teams validating new model versions, and by safety analysts and data scientists who analyze thousands of simulated scenarios and metrics to assess system readiness. The simulator is modular and supports both full-system and component-level runs. It operates at scale on distributed compute clusters, enabling us to simulate far more situations than we can cover on the road.
About the role
As a Simulation Backend Engineer, you'll design, build, and optimize the systems that power our distributed simulation workloads. You will work on everything from data pipelines and orchestration to cloud-based storage and microservice infrastructure. You’ll play a pivotal role in enabling our simulation engineers and researchers to run massive experiments with high efficiency and reliability.
What you'll do
- Architecting and implementing backend services for managing and orchestrating simulation jobs at scale.
- Designing efficient data storage and retrieval pipelines using systems like S3, Postgres, and Redis.
- Building and maintaining distributed messaging systems with Kafka for robust event-driven pipelines.
- Defining infrastructure as code using Terraform to automate deployment and scaling in AWS clusters.
- Collaborating with simulation engineers and infrastructure teams to ensure robust integration and performance.
What you'll need
- 3+ years of experience building backend services in production environments.
- Proficiency in at least one of the following languages: Python (preferred), Java, or Go.
- Deep understanding of cloud-native architecture and distributed systems.
- Hands-on experience with key technologies such as AWS (S3, EKS), Redis, Kafka, Postgres, and Terraform.
- Experience with containerization and orchestration (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes).
Candidates are required to be authorized to work in the U.S. The employer is not offering relocation, sponsorship, and remote work options are not available.
Avride is an equal opportunity employer and committed to providing reasonable accommodations to qualified applicants and employees with disabilities to ensure they have equal access to employment opportunities. Avride complies with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), if you need a reasonable accommodation to assist with the application or hiring process, or to perform the essential functions of a job, please email jobs@avride.ai.
Why work at Avride
- Cutting‑edge autonomy: Solve some of the hardest problems in perception, planning, and real‑time control for both cars and robots.
- Large, experienced team: Over 200 engineers, many from Yandex’s pioneering autonomous driving group, with deep domain knowledge.
- Fast‑paced, high‑impact environment: Work on technology used by hundreds of thousands of real customers.
- Global presence: Offices in Austin (HQ), Tel Aviv, Belgrade, and Seoul offer opportunities for international collaboration.
- Culture of ownership: Flat structure with small cross‑functional teams; engineers own features end‑to‑end.
- Work policy: Not explicitly stated, but roles span on‑site (operations), hybrid, and remote‑friendly positions depending on function.