Strategic Overview
Software Engineer — AI-Native CAD Integrations at Quilter is a dev opportunity centered on the specialist responsibilities and outcomes described in the employer's listing.
The published role emphasizes work such as Build great things that help humans 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.
The role is listed for United States with remote working arrangement, giving candidates the practical context needed to assess fit before applying. Relevant signals in the listing include Software Engineering, Senior.
Key information at a glance
About This Role
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.
Key Responsibilities & Objectives
- Build great things that help humans
- 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.
- 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.
Required Qualifications & Candidate Blueprint
- 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.
- General knowledge of binary formats.
- Familiarity with PCB / EDA / CAD workflows or hardware tinkering.
Salary & Benefits
Published compensation: USD 150,000 – 160,000 / yearly
- 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
Salary Benchmark
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Benchmark uses active employer job postings in our database and excludes this listing. It is not a third-party salary estimate, and currencies are not converted.
Full Job Description
The following is the complete job description supplied by the source. We sanitize unsafe markup and remove external links, but do not shorten or rewrite the employer's source content.
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:
Focus on the mission
Build great things that help humans
Demonstrate grit
Never stop learning
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.
Editor’s Market Perspective (Our Custom Analysis)
Why This Position Matters
This dev opening is a useful opportunity for candidates whose experience matches Software Engineering, Senior. Its strongest career signal is the scope of the work itself — particularly Build great things that help humans — rather than a generic title alone.
Resume & Application Strategy
For the application, mirror the employer's language where it truthfully matches your background: foreground Software Engineering, Senior, quantify outcomes from comparable work, and place the most relevant experience near the top of the resume. If the listing specifies tools, platforms, leadership scope, or domain experience, use those exact terms in context instead of presenting an unrelated keyword list.
We organize source-provided information into this independent job-seeker overview. Compensation is shown only when the source provides it; the official listing remains the authority for current requirements and application instructions.