---
title: 'Software Engineer — AI-Native CAD Integrations at Quilter'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-ai-native-cad-integrations-quilter-united-states-5kggwy1kzdgm'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-14'
---

# Software Engineer — AI-Native CAD Integrations at Quilter

- **Company:** Quilter
- **Location:** United States
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** remote
- **Posted:** 2026-05-07
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-14
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/quilter/3af729bb-81ff-44fe-a371-0725d79863f4

## 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

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).

## 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)

## Other roles at Quilter

- [Staff ML Systems Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/staff-ml-systems-engineer-quilter-united-states-p9mj44b3hdjv) — United States
- [Senior ML Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-ml-engineer-quilter-united-states-p0hgnk0xbdj6) — United States
- [Senior/Staff Software Engineer (C++)](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-staff-software-engineer-c-quilter-united-states-etpnpeqq5ksv) — United States
- [Opportunistic Application](https://feeny.ai/job/opportunistic-application-quilter-united-states-0yqp7y98n0bs) — United States