Founding Research Engineer, Physical AI & CAD Environments

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 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