---
title: 'Senior ML Engineer at Quilter'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-ml-engineer-quilter-united-states-p0hgnk0xbdj6'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-14'
---

# Senior ML Engineer at Quilter

- **Company:** Quilter
- **Location:** United States
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** remote
- **Posted:** 2026-04-03
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-14
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/quilter/2b0f95cb-7c8b-4b62-8bcb-b9993344f2f1

## 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:

- Curiosity
- Conviction
- Rigor

We're looking for a Senior ML Engineer to join Quilter's Placer Team and help us build the AI that automates component placement on PCBs.

## The Role

The Placer is responsible for automated component placement on PCBs. This role spans the full lifecycle: research, prototyping, productionization, and maintenance. You'll work across optimization, machine learning, and geometric deep learning on a hard, real-world combinatorial problem. This is a fully distributed team. We expect high autonomy and high ownership.

## What Youʼll Do

- Own problems end-to-end from exploratory R&D through production-hardened, maintainable systems
- Develop and extend GPU-accelerated code in PyTorch and CUDA C++
- Work across a broad modeling landscape including RL, graph neural networks, black-box/classical optimization, and generative modeling
- Formulate objectives, model constraints, and debug numerical behavior in the stack
- Contribute to technical direction and research strategy alongside senior teammates

## What Weʼre Looking For

- 5+ years of industry experience in ML, optimization, or a related field
- Strong fundamentals in machine learning and optimization
- Production PyTorch experience
- Demonstrated ability to work across research and production codebases
- Comfort operating with high autonomy in ambiguous problem spaces
- Strong communication and collaboration skills

## Preferred

- 5–7 years of industry experience (Staff-level appointment may be considered)
- CUDA C++ experience
- Background in any combination of: reinforcement learning, geometric deep learning, graph neural networks, multi-objective optimization, combinatorial optimization

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).

## About Quilter

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Quilter is a physics-driven AI that automates PCB placement and routing, enabling electronics design teams to generate board layouts in hours instead of months.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series B)
- **Headquarters**: Los Angeles, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2019
- **Founders**: Sergiy Nesterenko

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Electronic Design Automation (EDA) / AI for Hardware Design
- **Target customers**: Hardware engineering teams in consumer electronics, aerospace, defense, and regulated industries (B2B, Enterprise)
- **Mission or purpose statement**: Quilter exists so engineers spend their time inventing—not dragging traces at 2AM. The company aims to make PCB layout as plentiful and iterative as software builds, powering a new paradigm called Hardware-Rich Development™.

## Products & Services
- **Quilter AI (Physics-Driven PCB Layout Engine)**: An autonomous design agent that takes in schematics and constraints (from Altium, Cadence, Siemens, KiCAD) and outputs complete, manufacturable board layouts. Uses reinforcement learning trained on physics simulations (Maxwell’s equations, thermodynamics, manufacturing constraints), not on customer data. Returns files in the same format as submitted.
- **Self-Hosted / On-Premise Deployment**: Available for organizations with strict IP protection needs (aerospace, defense, ITAR compliance). Deploys into a customer’s own Kubernetes cluster as a Helm chart, with GPU requirements (NVIDIA GPUs, 16 GB VRAM).
- **Free Tier & Startup Program**: A free tier launched in August 2025 to give early-stage hardware startups access to the platform, plus a dedicated Startup Program.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total Funding — $35.0M (Series A: $10M led by Benchmark in Feb 2024; Series B: $25M led by Index Ventures in Apr 2025)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Benchmark (Eric Vishria joins Board), Index Ventures (Nina Achadjian joins Board)
- **Growth Signals**: 100k+ designs generated since Open Beta launch (Feb 2024). Headcount grew 50% YoY (19 employees). Team includes alumni from SpaceX, Apple, NASA, Johns Hopkins APL, MIT, Cadence, and Synopsys.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Physics-First AI, Not Human Data**: Trained via self-play against physics simulations (like AlphaGo), not on proprietary customer designs — a core privacy promise and technical moat. No training on paying customer data.
- **Autonomous End-to-End Layout**: Generates complete, manufacturable boards from schematics and constraints, reducing weeks of manual work to hours. Supports 100–1,000 components per board.
- **Transparent Design Review**: Provides clear feedback on which design aspects are “done” and which need further review, with continuous physics verification (DDR length matching, impedance control, clearances).
- **IP Protection & Compliance**: SOC 2 Type II certified, data encrypted at rest and in transit (TLS 1.3, AES-256). On-premise deployment option for the most sensitive environments.

## Strategic Focus
- **Expanding Capabilities**: Actively developing blind/buried vias, BGA fanout (in beta), length matching, and RF net handling. The “goldilocks zone” of supported board complexity is expanding with every release.
- **Hardware-Rich Development™**: Driving a paradigm where multiple board iterations can be run in parallel overnight, compressing delivery timelines from 4–8 weeks to days, and enabling 2–3 iterations in the time one used to take.
- **Market Adoption**: Targeting regulated industries (aerospace, defense, consumer electronics) with on-premise and GovCloud deployment options. Free tier and startup program to build developer mindshare early.

## Why Work Here
- **Talent & Culture**: Team built from SpaceX, Apple, NASA, Johns Hopkins APL, MIT, Cadence, Synopsys, and even operators from the 75th Rangers. Described as “first-principles engineering, a high bar, and respect for designers.”
- **Mission-Driven**: A chance to solve a real bottleneck in hardware engineering — turning months of layout work into minutes. The company believes “in five years, manual PCB design will feel like compiling code by hand.”
- **Engineering Focus**: Technical roles dominate (12 of 19 employees). Open positions include Senior/Staff Software Engineer (C++). The company is hiring for deep AI and systems engineering talent.
- **Work Environment**: Not explicitly stated, but the remote-friendly nature of the team (presence in US, India, Canada, Ireland) and the on-premise product suggest a flexible, engineering-driven culture.

## Sources
1. [quilter.ai](https://www.quilter.ai/)
2. [quilter.ai/about](https://www.quilter.ai/about)
3. [linkedin.com/company/quilterai](https://www.linkedin.com/company/quilterai)
4. [docs.quilter.ai/faq](https://docs.quilter.ai/about-quilter/faq)
5. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/quilter](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/quilter)

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