Product Designer UI/UX for Desktop 3D Engine in Melbourne

Lucky Robots is building the world’s first game engine for robotics — a real-time 3D simulation and training platform where AI learns to move, manipulate, and understand the physical world. We generate massive amounts of high-fidelity training data through large-scale simulation. Our flagship product, Lucky Engine, is a AAA-grade 3D simulation environment built for one purpose: making large-scale robot training and testing faster, more accessible, and more accurate than anything on the market.

The Role

Own the UI and UX of Lucky Engine end-to-end. You’ll define how a serious 3D simulation engine looks, feels, and behaves — from the viewport interaction model down to every inspector, panel, and shortcut. This is not a marketing site, mobile app, or admin dashboard. It is a desktop 3D engine — dense, visual, and powerful, but immediately legible. Your job is to design a tool as powerful as a AAA game engine and approachable enough that someone who has only ever used Cursor or VS Code can be productive in it.

What You’ll Design

• Viewport & 3D interaction — camera, gizmos, selection, the “feel” of working in 3D space
• Scene graph and hierarchy — how users build and navigate complex robotic scenes
• Node-based editors — behaviours, materials, data flow, scripting
• Robot and sensor configuration — joints, kinematics, cameras, lidar, IMU, contact sensors
• Simulation inspection & debugging — playback, scrubbing, state inspection, sensor visualisations
• Timeline and recording — capturing and reviewing training data runs
• Job orchestration — large-scale parallel simulation jobs and datasets
• Training data inspection — reviewing, filtering, and curating engine output
• High-density property panels and inspectors — modular, fast, scriptable
• AI Agent surface — a natural-language interface that lets users describe what they want the engine to do

You’ll work directly with the founders and engineers, set the design direction, and ship.

Design Vision

Lucky Engine should feel like the best of three worlds:

• The density and capability of a AAA game engine — Unreal Engine, Unity, Frostbite, Ubisoft’s Snowdrop, Decima.
• The approachability of modern developer tools — Cursor, VS Code, Linear.
• The information density of serious creative tools — Blender, Figma, Houdini — without the visual noise or steep onboarding cliff.

Professional-grade software that anyone can pick up. A researcher with a PhD, a hobbyist tinkering on weekends, a startup founder prototyping a robot, and an enterprise team running thousands of simulations should all feel at home.

Platforms

Lucky Engine ships on Windows and Linux as first-party platforms — both are equal citizens, not afterthoughts. Knowing the visual language, window management, font rendering, and file-dialog conventions of each platform matters.

Who You Are

You care deeply about how complex software feels to use. You think in pixels, interactions, and information hierarchy. Examples of the kinds of work that resonate with us include:

• 3D tools or game engines — Blender, Maya, Houdini, Unreal Engine, Frostbite, Unity.
• Developer tools or IDEs — Cursor, Visual Studio, VS Code, JetBrains IDEs.
• Complex data, design, or creative tools — Figma, Notion, Ableton, DaVinci Resolve.

You should be comfortable owning both UI and UX — information architecture, interaction, prototyping, visual design, and design systems. Strong opinions on dense UI, discoverability, and making complex tools feel approachable matter more to us than years on a resume.

Bonus

• 3D modeling, game development, or robotics experience as a user.
• You can build interactive prototypes (Figma, code, or in-engine mockups).
• A point of view on what existing robotics simulation tools get wrong.

Engagement

Contract-to-hire. Project-based contract with flexible hours. Strong fit converts to a founding designer role with full-time terms and equity. Melbourne (hybrid). Regular in-person collaboration with the founders and engineering team. Compensation: competitive, based on experience.

How to Apply

• Your portfolio — especially anything dense, technical, or desktop-shaped.
• A short note on a piece of software you think has great UX, one you think has terrible UX, and what you’d do about the latter.
• Anything else you want us to see — writing, mods, plugins, GitHub, Dribbble, demos.

We read everything. Real work beats a polished resume.