Founding Research Engineer, Physical AI

Steadyworks; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Steadyworks in San Francisco, CA, is hiring a Founding Research Engineer, Physical AI, to join early at the intersection of computational geometry, CAD, FEA, and AI research. You will help design and build environments for training and evaluating frontier AI models, collaborating with researchers from Steadyworks and frontier labs.

Ideal candidates have an advanced technical degree and 3+ years in AI tooling, R&D, and CAD/CAE workflows, with a track record of translating ideas into

Qualifications

• Advanced degree in Mechanical Engineering, Computational Engineering, AI, Robotics or related field, or equivalent industry experience.
• 3+ years of experience building and experimenting with AI tools, infrastructure or agents in Mechanical CAD/manufacturing/building design.
• Thrives in ambiguous, fast-moving environments with significant ownership.
• Experience in R&D and applied Research, with experiments in AI or related fields.
• Keeps up with research papers in the domain and enjoys turning ideas into production-quality systems.
• Strong working knowledge of B-rep geometry, NURBS curves/surfaces, and solid modeling fundamentals. Familiarity with CAD data interchange formats.
• Experience with Reinforcement Learning, LLM agents, dataset or benchmark development.
• Contributions to open source or published research.
• Background in mechanical engineering, robotics, CAD/CAE tools.

Responsibilities

• Build realistic environments for pre-training, mid-training, and post-training in mechanical engineering, CAE, robotics, and building design
• Design challenging real-world tasks that measure and improve agent capabilities
• Develop scalable infrastructure for frontier model capability evaluation and data generation
• Build tooling that converts expert workflows into high-quality RL environments and training data
• Collaborate with cross-functional partners, contribute to research directions, publish and share new evaluation methodologies.

Skills

Reinforcement Learning

LLM agents

Experiment design

Production-quality systems

B-rep geometry

NURBS curves

Solid modeling

R&D capabilities

Education

Advanced degree or equivalent experience

Tools

CAD

CAE

FEA

Python

Job description

Steadyworks is a data research lab powering the next generation of AI. We partner with frontier AI labs to build expert-grade datasets, reinforcement learning environments, and evaluation infrastructure that improve state-of-the-

The lab’s work has already contributed to multiple frontier model releases, offering team members the opportunity to work on high-impact, visible projects. Steadyworks is actively expanding its founding team, including research and engineering roles, as it scales its efforts in Physical AI and advanced data research.

Role Description

As a Founding Research Engineer, Physical AI at Steadyworks, you will work at the intersection of computational geometry, CAD, FEA simulation, design for manufacturing, and AI research, collaborating directly with our research team and with researchers at frontier AI labs.

Daily responsibilities :

• Build realistic environments for pre-training, mid-training, and post-training in mechanical engineering, CAE, robotics, and building design
• Design challenging real-world tasks that measure and improve agent capabilities
• Develop scalable infrastructure for frontier model capability evaluation and data generation
• Build tooling that converts expert workflows into high-quality RL environments and training data
• Collaborate with cross-functional partners, contribute to research directions, publish and share new evaluation methodologies.

This is a full-time, on-site role based in San Francisco, CA.

Qualifications

• Advanced degree in Mechanical Engineering, Computational Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics or a related technical field, or equivalent industry experience in AI research or engineering.
• 3+ years of experience building and experimenting with AI tools, infrastructure or agents in Mechanical CAD/ manufacturing/ building design.
• Thrives in ambiguous, fast-moving environments with significant ownership
• Experience in Research and Development (R&D) and applied Research, with a track record of designing, running, and interpreting experiments in AI or related fields.
• Keeps up with research papers in the domain and enjoys turning ideas into production-quality systems.
• Strong working knowledge of B-rep geometry, NURBS curves/surfaces, and solid modeling fundamentals. Familiarity with CAD data interchange formats.
• Experience with Reinforcement Learning, LLM agents, dataset or benchmark development
• Contributions to open source or published research
• Background in mechanical engineering, robotics, CAD/CAE tools.

Why Steadyworks?

Our vision is to become the category-defining data research lab for frontier AI. As one of our first research hires, you'll have outsized ownership over both the technical direction of the company and the products used by frontier AI labs. We're especially excited to talk with former founders and builders who want to work on hard technical problems.