Research Engineer, Design to Manufacturing

Job description

RESEARCH ENGINEER, DESIGN TO MANUFACTURING San Francisco, CA · In Person · Full-Time Applying to this role will also allow us to consider you for other research opportunities at Vizcom. We believe the best roles are shaped around exceptional people, not just job descriptions. ABOUT VIZCOM Vizcom is where design teams at companies like Nike, GM, New Balance, and Hasbro bring ideas from sketch to product. Designers use Vizcom to sketch, render, explore color and materials, work in 3D, and prepare concepts for production. The render itself was never the point. The point is the physical thing that comes after it. We call this pencil to product. Vizcom is a Series B company with more than $52M raised from investors including Radical Ventures, Index Ventures, Unusual Ventures, and Basis Set. Visualization has advanced quickly. Making has not. Between a beautiful render and a part a factory can actually produce sits a difficult set of problems: meshes that aren't solid, surfaces that can't be edited, geometry that doesn't reflect how products are manufactured, and softgoods that render convincingly but can't yet be translated into patterns, seams, or knit structures. Our customers design shoes, cars, power tools, toys, and other physical products, and their needs make the gap clear. Engineering teams need generated 3D geometry detailed and structured enough to hand off to mechanical engineers. Designers still trace curves from generated orthographic views into NURBS software. Color and material teams need to explore dozens of variations while preserving the underlying product geometry exactly. A render tells you what something looks like. Manufacturing requires a description of what it actually is: form, material, dimension, behavior, and the technical artifacts that carry those decisions downstream. Geometry is the spine of that chain, but it's only one part of it. The representations, benchmarks, and workflows that will ultimately connect generative design to manufacturing are still being defined. This role will help define them. THE ROLE As a Research Engineer, Design to Manufacturing, you'll work on closing the distance between pixels and atoms. You'll own an emerging research direction at Vizcom focused on moving generated design concepts toward physical production: determining which parts of that chain we should attack first, which representations are worth betting on, and how we define and measure whether an output is actually useful downstream. Geometry is likely where the work begins. It isn't necessarily where it ends. You'll work alongside researchers focused on post-training and engineers building the data systems that capture how professional designers work. Together, the goal is to close the loop between designer intent, model behavior, physical constraints, and manufacturability. Over time, manufacturability itself can become a signal models learn from, while designer intent becomes a constraint on the geometry they generate. If you're primarily interested in making generated images look better, this probably isn't the role for you. If you're interested in getting from a sketch or generated concept to something an engineer, pattern maker, or factory can actually use, it might be. We don't have a predetermined answer for which representations will win. Meshes, implicit fields, parametric surfaces, B-reps, CAD operation sequences, or approaches that haven't yet emerged are all possibilities. We're interested in what survives contact with the real world. WHAT YOU'LL OWN - The design-to-manufacturing roadmap: Map the path from generated concept to physical product, identifying which problems are tractable now and which require longer-term research. - Geometry: Explore approaches for translating generated 3D into editable, manufacturable geometry, including parametric surfaces, curve extraction, reconstruction, and CAD handoff. - Material and color: Help connect rendered appearance to real-world specifications, including materials, finishes, color, and other physical properties. - Softgoods: Explore the challenges unique to products that are sewn, knit, or otherwise constructed from flexible materials, including pattern generation, seam logic, drape, and fit. - Manufacturability: Bring physical constraints such as manifoldness, tolerances, wall thickness, structure, drape, and fit into the generation process rather than treating them solely as downstream repair problems. - Production-ready outputs: Define and build toward the artifacts downstream teams actually consume, including CAD files, patterns, specifications, and technical documentation. - Evaluation: Establish what "production-ready" or "factory-acceptable" means for different product categories and build evaluation methods around those standards. - Customer pilots: Use real customer workflows as test cases and turn recurring problems into research questions. - The research feedback loop: Partner with our ML data and post-training teams so physical constraints, designer judgment, and model behavior can eventually inform one another. This is a charter, not a week-one checklist. We don't expect one person to solve every part of the design-to-manufacturing chain at once. A meaningful part of the role is determining where to start and which problems are worth solving first. WHAT YOUR FIRST 90 DAYS COULD LOOK LIKE Days 1–30: Understand Immerse yourself in current customer workflows, Vizcom's 3D systems, existing failure cases, and the handoffs between designers and downstream engineering or manufacturing teams. Talk directly with the people doing the work and understand where today's workflows break down. Days 30–60: Demonstrate Take one real customer workflow and remove or materially improve one manual step from it, end to end. Days 60–90: Set direction Develop an initial design-to-manufacturing research roadmap: which parts of the chain we should pursue, in what sequence, which representations appear most promising, and how we'll measure progress. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - Deep expertise in at least one relevant area, such as computational geometry, geometry processing, 3D reconstruction or generation, appearance and material modeling, cloth or textile simulation, or computational fabrication. - Working familiarity with adjacent areas and an interest in understanding the entire path from digital representation to physical product. - Hands-on experience with modern generative, reconstruction, or simulation methods. - Strong software engineering skills and the ability to turn research ideas and papers into working systems. - Experience designing experiments and evaluations for problems where established benchmarks may not exist. - Comfort working on an open-ended research problem where the right representation, methodology, and success criteria are still being discovered. - A desire to connect research directly to real product and customer workflows. NICE TO HAVE - Experience with CAD kernels, B-reps, solid modeling, parametric modeling, NURBS, or Class-A surfacing. - Experience with color science, material or appearance capture, or physically based rendering. - Experience with textiles, pattern generation, knit systems, apparel or footwear engineering. - Experience with physical simulation, including cloth simulation, finite element analysis, or structural validation. - Familiarity with manufacturing processes and design-for-manufacturing constraints. - Experience shipping a physical product or working directly with the handoff between industrial design, engineering, and manufacturing. Above all, we're looking for someone who judges a generated model not only by how it looks, but by whether it could actually exist. WHAT YOU'LL GET - A genuinely open research problem: The path from generated design to production is still being defined, and you'll have meaningful influence over how Vizcom approaches it. - Real-world demand: You'll work against actual workflows and problems coming from professional design teams building physical products. - Research that reaches product: Your work won't live in isolation. Successful approaches can become part of the tools professional designers use every day. - A complementary research team: You'll work alongside engineers building our ML data systems and researchers focused on post-training, creating the opportunity to connect designer intent, model behavior, and physical constraints. - High ownership: You'll help establish both the research direction and the standards by which we evaluate progress. - Direct access to the founders: You'll work closely with Vizcom's founders and technical leadership as we build out this research area. BENEFITS AT VIZCOM - 100% employer-sponsored medical coverage for employees, plus 25% coverage toward dependents - Dental and vision coverage, plus mental health benefits - Meaningful equity ownership - Flexible PTO - 401(k) with employer match - Generous annual Learning & Development allowance - Paid parental leave - Weekly catered lunch at our San Francisco headquarters - Monthly gym membership stipend COMPENSATION Base salary: $230,000–$320,000 USD + equity We regularly benchmark compensation against relevant peer companies using current market data from industry-standard sources, including Carta and Pave. This range reflects our Tier 1 compensation market, which includes San Francisco. The actual offer and overall compensation package will be determined based on multiple factors, including relevant experience, skills, qualifications, and business considerations. The compensation and benefits described in this posting apply to U.S.-based W-2 employees and may vary based on applicable employment laws and requirements. HOW WE WORK - We document what we learned, not just what we worked on. - Negative results are valuable when they help us close off the wrong paths. - Results should be reproducible before they earn additional compute. - We share meaningful research through technical write-ups, demonstrations, and showcases where appropriate. - Our interview process emphasizes real-world problem solving and practical technical work rather than LeetCode-style interviews. LOCATION This is an in-person role based in San Francisco, CA. JOIN US At Vizcom, we move quickly, give people meaningful ownership, and offer the opportunity to shape both our product and our company as we grow. We believe deeply in the craft of industrial design and in building tools that help designers bring better ideas into the physical world. Join us in shaping a world designed by you. A NOTE TO CANDIDATES AND RECRUITING AGENCIES Please apply directly through this job posting. To help us keep our hiring process fair and organized, we ask candidates not to contact Vizcom employees directly regarding their application or candidacy. Vizcom is not seeking assistance from external recruiting agencies or search firms for this role. Please do not contact or solicit Vizcom employees regarding recruiting services, candidate submissions, or agency partnerships. Unsolicited resumes or candidate profiles submitted by agencies will not create a fee obligation on behalf of Vizcom. As part of Vizcom's SOC 2 Type II compliance program, employment is contingent upon successful completion of a background check, as permitted by applicable law.