Job Details

Lead Software Automation & Toolchain Engineer

We're hiring a Lead Software Automation & Toolchain Engineer to join a frontier physical AI startup building autonomous systems that can experiment, reason, and discover in the real world

The team is a small, world-class group pushing beyond simulation and software-only AI. Their systems operate across a 20,000 sq ft physical intelligence factory and support a $42M federally funded program, enabling ML-driven agents to directly command real engineering tools and workflows.

This role owns the automation substrate that connects AI agents to the physical world — unifying CAD, EDA, CAE, and scientific tools into clean, deterministic, agent-callable interfaces. You'll define how intelligent systems manipulate real engineering stacks at scale.

What you'll do:

• Build reproducible adapters and automation pipelines that make heterogeneous engineering tools fully agent-callable
• Design structured APIs, parsers, classifiers, and fault-tolerant execution flows across CAD, EDA, CAE, and scientific toolchains
• Wrap commercial and open-source engineering tools into deterministic, scriptable workflows with robust validation and recovery
• Partner closely with ML researchers, agent systems engineers, and domain experts to automate end-to-end engineering workflows
• Make foundational architecture decisions in a fast-moving, first-principles environment

What we're looking for:

• Senior or Lead-level experience automating engineering or scientific tools (e.g., CAD, EDA, CAE, CAM, COMSOL, simulation platforms)
• Strong systems-thinking ability across heterogeneous tools, file formats, and execution environments
• Proven ability to build reproducible, fault-tolerant automation pipelines and structured tool interfaces
• Comfort working at the boundary of software systems, ML-driven agents, and real-world engineering workflows
• Thrives in high-ownership, frontier research environments

Location: San Francisco or Redwood City