Physics Programmer - Next-Generation Wargaming & Decision-Support Platform

About Code Metal: Code Metal is the leader in automated software engineering, specializing in provably correct code for defense and aerospace industries. Clients include the U.S. Air Force, L3Harris, RTX, and Toshiba. Founded in 2023 with offices in Boston and San Francisco, Code Metal is backed by Accel, Salesforce Ventures, B Capital, and others.

About the Role:

Our Modeling & Simulation team is building a next-generation wargaming and decision-support platform for the Department of Defense (DoW). This platform helps make multi-billion-dollar force-design decisions before they are implemented in real-world scenarios. The team combines simulation, physics, backend/data systems, frontend/geospatial visualization, and AI systems to create extensible, mission-level simulations trusted by government users.

We are seeking a Physics Programmer to bring commercial game development performance standards to our wargaming platform. You will architect and build the core C++ simulation runtime that executes physics, behavior, and mission models developed by engineers and domain experts. This role offers scope of ownership, architectural authority, and mentorship responsibilities that scale with experience.

The work will span entity-component systems, data-oriented architecture, simulation scheduling, concurrency, deterministic execution, memory management, model integration, and engine-wide performance optimization. Ideal candidates will have experience in commercial game development, game-engine development, or other performance-constrained real-time environments where frame time, memory, latency, stability, and hardware limitations are critical. Experience building custom physics engines, owning core systems within proprietary engines, or developing low-level physics and runtime infrastructure for major game platforms is highly valued.

Defense experience is not required. We prioritize candidates who have shipped real-time C++ systems, optimized them under hard performance budgets, and made foundational architectural decisions within complex engine codebases.

What You’ll Do:

• Architect and implement the core C++ runtime behind a large-scale, interactive wargaming platform.
• Own the structure, performance, and long-term health of a substantial engine codebase.
• Design and evolve an entity-component-system architecture for representing large numbers of heterogeneous simulation entities.
• Build data-oriented component storage, entity lifecycle management, system queries, execution graphs, and dependency-aware scheduling.
• Define engine interfaces for registering and executing physics, AI, sensor, weapon, behavior, and environmental models.
• Create stable extension points for model developers to add capabilities without destabilizing the engine core.
• Design simulation loops, fixed and variable time stepping, event processing, system ordering, state transitions, and deterministic replay.
• Develop multithreaded and task-based execution systems for safely parallelizing simulation workloads.
• Optimize memory layout, allocation, cache locality, component access, serialization, and data movement.
• Profile and improve CPU utilization, memory use, latency, throughput, and simulation rate against explicit performance budgets.
• Build spatial indexing, broad-phase query, collision-candidate, visibility, and proximity-query infrastructure.
• Integrate externally developed physics and mathematical models into a consistent, performant runtime.
• Develop checkpointing, snapshotting, state replication, save-and-restore, and reproducible replay systems.
• Establish architecture for networked and distributed simulation, including ownership, synchronization, prediction, and state transfer.
• Build tooling for model developers to inspect entities, debug system execution, profile model cost, and understand simulation state.
• Identify and eliminate architectural bottlenecks as simulation scale and model complexity increase.
• Lead engine design reviews, mentor other programmers, and raise the standard for C++ architecture and performance engineering.
• Remain deeply hands-on in implementation, profiling, debugging, and code review.

Required Qualifications:

• Extensive professional C++ development experience, or equivalent, building performance-critical production software.
• Significant experience in commercial game development, game-engine development, or a similarly performance-constrained real-time environment.
• Experience shipping at least one commercial game, engine, platform, or interactive real-time product.
• Demonstrated ownership of foundational engine systems rather than primarily gameplay features, scripting, tools, or application-level integrations.
• Experience building or substantially extending a physics engine, game engine, simulation runtime, ECS, job system, or comparable core technology.
• Expert command of modern C++, including object lifetimes, ownership, templates, concurrency, synchronization, profiling, and low-level debugging.
• Strong understanding of data-oriented design, memory layout, cache behavior, allocation strategies, and performance-sensitive data structures.
• Experience designing or extending an entity-component system or comparable composition-based runtime architecture.
• Experience with engine loops, execution graphs, task systems, event systems, dependency management, or runtime scheduling.
• Demonstrated ability to optimize against hard CPU, memory, latency, and frame- or tick-time budgets.
• Experience using commercial profiling and debugging tools to diagnose CPU stalls, memory issues, thread contention, allocation problems, and cache inefficiencies.
• Working knowledge of real-time physics concepts such as coordinate systems, numerical integration, collision detection, spatial partitioning, constraints, and simulation stability.
• Experience designing APIs, plugin systems, SDKs, or extension frameworks used by other programmers.
• Experience maintaining and improving a large C++ codebase while continuing to deliver production capabilities.
• Experience leading major technical initiatives while remaining an active individual contributor.
• Active Secret clearance or eligibility to obtain one.

Strongly Preferred:

• Experience with SIMD, GPU compute, custom allocators, job systems, lock-free structures, or platform-specific optimization.
• Experience supporting very large worlds or simulations containing large numbers of active entities.
• Experience with engine-level serialization, snapshotting, replay, world partitioning, or streaming.
• Familiarity with aerospace, robotics, autonomy, and defense simulations (e.g., HLA, DIS, OneSAF, JSAF, NGTS, STK, AFISM).
• Experience supporting Air Force, Space Force, joint, or broader DoW acquisition and mission-analysis programs.
• Experience developing models for sensors, weapons, electronic warfare, jamming, communications, logistics, or command and control.
• Active U.S. security clearance (Secret, Top Secret, or SCI/SAP).

Principal Level Expectations:

• Years of Experience: 10+
• Engineering Craft & Code Quality: Sets the quality and correctness bar across the department; work is the example others learn from; improves automated systems and practices for department-wide quality.
• Architecture & Technical Knowledge: Provides architectural guidance across the department and invents paradigms solving CodeMetal-specific domain problems; a key resource on every major system.
• Delivery, Scoping & De-risking: A consistent contributor to the company's technical roadmap; gives reliable estimates for large cross-team initiatives; ensures pragmatic scoping toward the most valuable outcomes.
• Technical Leadership & Mentorship: An active driver of company-wide architectural reviews and proposals; mentors mid-level and senior staff at scale; influences others across departments toward the best technical outcome.