Software Engineer — AI-Native CAD Integrations

Job description

ABOUT QUILTER At Quilter, we are helping electrical engineers save time and accomplish more by automating the tedious and time-consuming task of designing printed circuit boards (PCBs). Our small team is composed of experts in electrical engineering, electromagnetic simulation, ML/AI, and high-performance computing (HPC). We are inventing and leveraging novel techniques to solve the decades-old problem of automating circuit board design where today hundreds of billions of dollars are spent. We have raised $25 million in Series B funding from some of the very best and are charging full-speed toward our goal. No matter where we come from, we're united by a common vision for the future and a core set of values we think will get us there: 1. Focus on the mission 2. Build great things that help humans 3. Demonstrate grit 4. Never stop learning 5. Pursue excellence Quilter's File I/O team builds the bridges between Quilter and the world's leading PCB CAD tools—Altium, Cadence Allegro, and Siemens Xpedition. You'll work primarily in our Python File I/O codebase: parsing, translating, and generating complex (and often undocumented) CAD formats, and mapping them into Quilter's internal "board" model. This is a genuinely AI-native team—and we'll make you dangerous with it. A lot of companies say "we use AI." Here, we will pay for you to master it: - Build your own agent harnesses for the kind of reverse-engineering we do—parsing undocumented binary formats, mapping vendor schemas, automating the tedious parts of integration work. - Run real model evals on our actual problems—not vibes or Twitter threads. - Develop genuine craft in prompting, context engineering, and MCP server design—skills that compound over your whole career. - Operate with the leverage of a team of ten. Work that used to require a squad of engineers, you'll learn to ship solo. - You'll leave this job a substantially more capable engineer than you arrived. That's the deal. What You'll Do - Build and extend integrations with CAD vendors' file formats and scripting systems. - Reverse-engineer proprietary binary and text-based formats, with support from senior engineers. - Help shape Quilter's internal PCB representation as we expand support for new tools. - Write robust, well-tested code that holds up against messy real-world customer data. - Use—and help build—the next generation of agent-powered workflows for CAD reverse engineering. - Own features end-to-end: design, implementation, testing, rollout. What We're Looking For - 3-7 years of software engineering experience, with meaningful backend or systems work. - Strong Python proficiency. This is the language you'll spend nearly all your time in, and real expertise here matters more than anything else on this list. A track record of writing clean, maintainable code in real production codebases. - Genuine excitement about coding agents and a real hunger to get great at them—you want a team that will invest in that growth, not throttle it. - Comfort with ambiguous, reverse-engineering-flavored problems: unfamiliar code, undocumented formats, weird edge cases. - General knowledge of binary formats. - Solid fundamentals in design, testing, and debugging. - Strong communication and high ownership in a fast-moving startup environment. Nice to Have (genuinely nice-to-have — none of these are required, and we don't expect any one candidate to have most of them) - A little C or C++ — not required at all, but occasionally helpful for skimming vendor SDKs or binary formats. - Familiarity with PCB / EDA / CAD workflows or hardware tinkering. - Experience with binary or large-scale serialization formats (protobuf, custom binary, XML, JSON). - Experience building tooling around coding agents (evals, harnesses, MCP servers, etc.). - Cloud infra (AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform). - Open-source contributions in developer tooling, CAD, or simulation. Please note: We are an equal opportunity employer. At this time, we are focused on hiring primarily within the US, with occasional exception to accommodate exceptional talent. WHAT WE OFFER: - Interesting and challenging work - Competitive salary and equity benefits - Health, dental, and vision insurance - Regular team events and offsites (~4x / year) - Unlimited paid time off - Paid parental leave Want to learn more about Quilter, our vision, and our investors? Visit our About http://quilter.ai/about page and visit our Blog https://quilter.ai/blog.