Software Engineering Intern, Physics Simulation

Overview

Join NVIDIA's Physics Simulation Team as a Software Engineering Intern, working on a feature within Newton physics or building a user workflow using Newton to solve customer needs and accelerate robot learning.

What you'll do

• Collaborate with senior robotics and simulation engineers to understand a customer need and develop a Newton core feature or a reusable workflow using Newton.
• Take ownership of a scoped contribution from investigation through implementation and evaluation, with guidance, mentoring, and code review from experienced engineers.
• Design experiments to demonstrate measurable improvements in correctness, physical fidelity, reliability, performance, or usability using robotics software stacks and, where appropriate, robotic hardware.
• Use AI-assisted development tools to explore approaches, implement and debug code, and validate results.
• Contribute tests, documentation, and maintainable software that help users get reliable simulation results and accelerate robot learning.

What you'll need

• Pursuing an MS or PhD in Computer Science, Robotics, Physics, or a related field.
• Strong analytical abilities, with foundations in mathematical analysis, linear algebra, numerical algorithms, and physics.
• Strong programming skills and the ability to understand, modify, and debug an existing codebase.
• Proficiency with AI-assisted development and coding agents, including the ability to understand, challenge, and validate generated work and explain your technical decisions.
• Good judgment in choosing meaningful problems and defining manageable experiments, with a willingness to learn independently and adapt as requirements and priorities change.
• Solid software engineering foundations, clear technical communication, and a willingness to take responsibility for the quality and health of the shared project.

Nice to have

• Experience with physics engines such as Newton, PhysX, or MuJoCo, or with numerical simulation and scientific computing.
• Hands-on experience in robotics, control, robotic manipulation, or machine learning for robotics.
• Experience with NVIDIA's robotics software stack, such as Isaac Sim and Isaac Lab.
• Experience with GPU programming and performance analysis using NVIDIA Warp or CUDA.
• A project demonstrating careful experimental design, physical or numerical validation, and reusable software or research results.

Details

• Location: Zurich, Switzerland.
• Start: During 2027.
• Expected duration: 6 months.
• The specific project will be selected closer to the internship start.