Lead Software Automation & Toolchain Engineer
Job Description
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