Software Engineer — AI-Native CAD Integrations

Quilter; Los Angeles (CA); On-site; USD 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary and equity benefits

Health, dental, and vision insurance

Unlimited paid time off

Paid parental leave

Regular team events and offsites

Job summary

Quilter is seeking a Software Engineer in Los Angeles to work on integrations with CAD systems, focusing on reverse-engineering tasks and file management. You will be responsible for building and extending integrations with CAD vendors' file formats and writing robust, maintainable code.

The ideal candidate will have 3-7 years of experience, strong Python skills, a passion for coding agents, and excellent problem-solving abilities. Competitive salary, equity benefits, and unlimited PTO are offered.

Qualifications

• 3-7 years of software engineering experience, with meaningful backend or systems work.
• Genuine excitement about coding agents and a real hunger to get great at them.
• Comfort with ambiguous, reverse-engineering-flavored problems.

Responsibilities

• Build and extend integrations with CAD vendors' file formats and scripting systems.
• Reverse-engineer proprietary binary and text-based formats.
• Write robust, well-tested code that holds up against messy real-world customer data.

Skills

Strong Python proficiency

Software engineering experience

General knowledge of binary formats

Solid fundamentals in design, testing, and debugging

Strong communication skills

Job description

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:

1. Focus on the mission
2. Build great things that help humans
3. Demonstrate grit
4. Never stop learning
5. 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:

• 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.
• Run real model evals on our actual problems—not vibes or Twitter threads.
• Develop genuine craft in prompting, context engineering, and MCP server design—skills that compound over your whole career.
• Operate with the leverage of a team of ten. Work that used to require a squad of engineers, you'll learn to ship solo.
• You'll leave this job a substantially more capable engineer than you arrived. That's the deal.

What You’ll Do

• Build and extend integrations with CAD vendors' file formats and scripting systems.
• Reverse‑engineer proprietary binary and text‑based formats, with support from senior engineers.
• Help shape Quilter's internal PCB representation as we expand support for new tools.
• Write robust, well‑tested code that holds up against messy real‑world customer data.
• Use—and help build—the next generation of agent‑powered workflows for CAD reverse engineering.
• Own features end‑to‑end: design, implementation, testing, rollout.

What We're Looking For

• 3‑7 years of software engineering experience, with meaningful backend or systems work.
• 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.
• 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.
• Comfort with ambiguous, reverse‑engineering‑flavored problems: unfamiliar code, undocumented formats, weird edge cases.
• General knowledge of binary formats.
• Solid fundamentals in design, testing, and debugging.
• 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

• A little C or C++ — not required at all, but occasionally helpful for skimming vendor SDKs or binary formats.
• Familiarity with PCB / EDA / CAD workflows or hardware tinkering.
• Experience with binary or large‑scale serialization formats (protobuf, custom binary, XML, JSON).
• Experience building tooling around coding agents (evals, harnesses, MCP servers, etc.).
• Cloud infra (AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform).
• Open‑source contributions in developer tooling, CAD, or simulation.

Please note: We are an equal opportunity employer. At this time, we are focused on hiring primarily within the US, with occasional exception to accommodate exceptional talent.

What we offer:

• Interesting and challenging work
• Competitive salary and equity benefits
• Health, dental, and vision insurance
• Regular team events and offsites (~4x / year)
• Unlimited paid time off
• Paid parental leave

Want to learn more about Quilter, our vision, and our investors? Visit our About page and visit our Blog.