Software Engineer — AI-Native CAD Integrations
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:
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Focus on the mission
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Build great things that help humans
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Demonstrate grit
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Never stop learning
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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:
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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.
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Run real model evals on our actual problems—not vibes or Twitter threads.
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Develop genuine craft in prompting, context engineering, and MCP server design—skills that compound over your whole career.
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Operate with the leverage of a team of ten. Work that used to require a squad of engineers, you'll learn to ship solo.
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You'll leave this job a substantially more capable engineer than you arrived. That's the deal.
What You'll Do
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Build and extend integrations with CAD vendors' file formats and scripting systems.
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Reverse-engineer proprietary binary and text-based formats, with support from senior engineers.
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Help shape Quilter's internal PCB representation as we expand support for new tools.
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Write robust, well-tested code that holds up against messy real-world customer data.
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Use—and help build—the next generation of agent-powered workflows for CAD reverse engineering.
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Own features end-to-end: design, implementation, testing, rollout.
What We're Looking For
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3-7 years of software engineering experience, with meaningful backend or systems work.
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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.
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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.
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Comfort with ambiguous, reverse-engineering-flavored problems: unfamiliar code, undocumented formats, weird edge cases.
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General knowledge of binary formats.
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Solid fundamentals in design, testing, and debugging.
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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)
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A little C or C++ — not required at all, but occasionally helpful for skimming vendor SDKs or binary formats.
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Familiarity with PCB / EDA / CAD workflows or hardware tinkering.
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Experience with binary or large-scale serialization formats (protobuf, custom binary, XML, JSON).
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Experience building tooling around coding agents (evals, harnesses, MCP servers, etc.).
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Cloud infra (AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform).
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Open-source contributions in developer tooling, CAD, o