Senior/Staff Software Engineer — AI-Native CAD Integrations

Role Description

Quilter is seeking a Senior / Staff Backend Engineer to join our File I/O Team. This group integrates Quilter with the world’s leading PCB CAD vendors—such as Altium, Cadence Allegro, Siemens Xpedition, and Zuken. You’ll design and maintain the critical bridges that let engineers move seamlessly between Quilter and existing CAD environments.

In this role, you’ll combine deep backend engineering skills with the ability to quickly learn new technical domains—from parsing and generating complex CAD formats to managing Quilter’s internal “board” model. As a senior member of the team, you’ll shape technical direction, mentor others, and own high-impact projects end-to-end.

What You'll Do

• Architect and extend integrations with CAD vendors' file formats and scripting systems, setting the technical direction for how we onboard new tools.
• Lead reverse-engineering of proprietary binary and text-based formats, and mentor other engineers through ambiguous, undocumented territory.
• Drive the evolution of Quilter's internal PCB representation as we expand support across the ECAD ecosystem.
• Write robust, well-tested code that holds up against messy real-world customer data, and raise the bar for quality and testing standards across the team.
• Use—and help build—the next generation of agent-powered workflows for CAD reverse engineering.
• Own features end-to-end: design, implementation, testing, and rollout, with the judgment to make sound architectural trade-offs independently.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of software engineering experience, with substantial backend or systems work and a track record of owning complex projects end-to-end.
• Expert Python proficiency. This is the language you'll spend nearly all your time in, and deep, production-grade expertise here matters more than anything else on this list. You write clean, maintainable code and have shaped the standards of the codebases you've worked in.
• Moderate hands-on exposure to at least one ECAD tool (e.g., Altium, KiCad, OrCAD, Cadence Allegro, Siemens/Mentor Xpedition, or Eagle) and general familiarity with PCB / EDA / CAD workflows.
• 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 leading ambiguous, reverse-engineering-flavored problems: unfamiliar code, undocumented formats, weird edge cases.
• General knowledge of binary formats.
• Deep fundamentals in design, testing, and debugging, with the ability to set patterns others follow.
• Strong communication, technical leadership, and high ownership in a fast-moving startup environment, including mentoring less-experienced engineers.

Nice to Have

• A little C or C++ — not required at all, but occasionally helpful for skimming vendor SDKs or binary formats.
• Deeper PCB / EDA / CAD domain expertise or hardware tinkering beyond moderate tool exposure.
• 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.

Benefits

• 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

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.