Senior Principal Architect, Digital Twin

The Digital Twin & Simulation Architect will lead the strategy, design, and implementation of high-fidelity digital twins for systems, machines, job sites, and end-to-end workflows. This leader will translate product, engineering, and operations needs into scalable simulation architectures that improve product and job site efficiency.

What You Will Do:

• Establish Vision & Strategy: Work with senior management to define the long-term vision, architecture, and processes for simulation and digital twinning across products, job sites, and workflows.
• Roadmap Development: Partner with leadership to establish a multi-year simulation and digital twin roadmap, ensuring alignment with business priorities, product development cycles, and customer needs.
• Translate Business Requirements Into Simulation Solutions: Interpret business and technical requirements, identifying where simulations and digital twins can improve decision-making, reduce validation time, enhance customer value, or de-risk design choices.
• Develop Architecture & Technical Deliverables: Create detailed architecture deliverables, including model design standards, interoperability requirements, data connections, data annotations architecture, and simulation workflows that support enterprise-level problem solving.
• Define Supporting Technical Infrastructure: Determine the technologies, platforms, and integration patterns required to support simulation and digital twin capabilities-including selection of annotation tools & methods, modeling tools, cloud/edge infrastructure, data pipelines, and validation/testing approaches.
• Evaluate & Deploy New Technologies: Lead the evaluation, selection, and deployment of emerging simulation tools, modeling frameworks, and enabling technologies that improve performance, scalability, or accuracy.
• Enable Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work closely with engineering, autonomy, controls, software, product teams, and enterprise data groups to ensure simulation solutions meet business outcomes and integrate seamlessly with existing systems.
• Integrate Existing Simulations & Models: Assess current simulation assets across Caterpillar and define the strategy to integrate, extend, or consolidate them into a cohesive digital ecosystem.
• Ensure Scalable, Validated Digital Twins: Oversee model validation, correlation with physical test data, and governance processes so digital twins remain accurate and trusted for engineering and customer decision-making.

• Design, Architecture: Knowledge of basic activities and deliverables of simulation and digital twin design; ability to utilize methodologies, tools and techniques to convert business requirements and logical models into a technical application design.
• Data Architecture: Knowledge of processes, techniques and factors that affect data architecture, data annotation and data pip-line; ability to design blueprints on how to integrate data resources for business processes and functional support.
• Platform Architecture: Knowledge of technologies and methods to design platforms and roadmaps to create digital twinning systems; ability to design these roadmaps and deploy supportive interfaces for end-users to access related systems, in accordance with standards and processes.
• Requirements Analysis: Knowledge of tools, methods, and techniques of requirement analysis; ability to elicit, analyze and record required business functionality and non-functionality requirements to ensure the success of a system or software development project.
• Target Architecture: Knowledge of target architecture; ability to develop the roadmap while aligning the architecture and processes with business strategies and objectives

Top Candidates Will Have:

• Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Computer Science, Systems Engineering, or related discipline (Master's or PhD preferred) or equivalent experience.

• 10+ years in simulation, digital twin development, robotics, autonomy, or systems engineering-with direct experience deploying Omniverse-based digital twins strongly preferred. Background in building or guiding complex modeling frameworks for heavy machinery, robotics, automotive, aerospace, or industrial systems.

• Strong expertise in system-level simulation and digital twin technologies. This includes but is not limited to multi-physics modeling, data driven/statistic simulations, discrete-events simulation and machine learning based simulation.

• Deep expertise in NVIDIA Omniverse for building industrial-grade digital twins, including USD-based workflows, real-time physics, high-fidelity rendering, collaborative simulation pipelines, and integration with external model sources.

• Experience architecting or integrating modeling ecosystems with tools such as CARLA, Dynasty, Simulink/Modelica, AMESim, ANSYS, Adams, GT-Suite, Unity/Unreal, or robotics/automation frameworks.

• Knowledge of information architecture for simulation data, including cloud/edge compute, IoT data integration, data annotation and labeling, and real-time telemetry ingestion.

• Ability to evaluate emerging technologies and strategically recommend adoption paths for simulation and digital twinning.

• Deep understanding of simulation architecture, model governance, verification/validation practices, and integration of simulations with real-time data sources.

Tuition reimbursement, Parental leave, 401(k), Health insurance, Paid time off, Employee discount, Vision insurance, Health savings account, Subject to plan eligibility, terms, and guidelines. This is a summary list of benefits.

• Medical, dental, and vision benefits*
• Paid time off plan (Vacation, Holidays, Volunteer, etc.)*
• 401(k) savings plans*
• Health Savings Account (HSA)*
• Flexible Spending Accounts (FSAs)*
• Health Lifestyle Programs*
• Employee Assistance Program*
• Voluntary Benefits and Employee Discounts*
• Career Development*
• Incentive bonus*
• Disability benefits
• Life Insurance
• Parental leave
• Adoption benefits
• Tuition Reimbursement

Your Work Shapes the World at Caterpillar Inc. When you join Caterpillar, you're joining a global team who cares not just about the work we do - but also about each other. We are the makers, problem solvers, and future world builders who are creating stronger, more sustainable communities. We don't just talk about progress and innovation here - we make it happen, with our customers, where we work and live. Together, we are building a better world, so we can all enjoy living in it.