Product Software Engineer, 3D/CAD & Manufacturing Workflows

Valstad•Austin, TX

6d•$145,000 - $185,000•Onsite

About The Position

Valstad is rebuilding how ships are made by developing robotic production systems that can turn engineering data directly into finished steel structures. The software engineer will develop interactive 3D applications and technical workflows used by manufacturing engineers, robotics engineers, weld engineers, operators, and quality personnel. These tools will help users understand complex steel structures, review automatically generated manufacturing plans, resolve exceptions, release work to production, and track factory floor activities. The role requires comfort with building polished user experiences while also reasoning about geometry, revisions, coordinate systems, manufacturing constraints, and backend orchestration. The ideal candidate is a strong, product-minded software engineer who enjoys turning complex technical processes into clear, reliable tools.

Requirements

Four or more years of professional software-engineering experience.
Strong experience building production web applications.
Strong proficiency with TypeScript and modern frontend frameworks such as React.
Experience building interactive graphical or data-intensive applications.
Experience designing and implementing backend APIs and data models.
Strong understanding of application state, asynchronous workflows, and distributed systems.
Experience owning features from requirements through production deployment.
Strong product judgment and attention to interaction details.
Ability to work directly with highly technical users and domain experts.
Ability to reason clearly about complex workflows, state transitions, and exception paths.
Experience writing automated tests and debugging production systems.
Willingness to work on-site and spend time with engineers and operators on the factory floor.

Nice To Haves

Experience with Three.js, React Three Fiber, Babylon.js, WebGL, or another real-time 3D graphics framework.
Experience developing CAD, CAM, PLM, BIM, simulation, digital-twin, or engineering software.
Experience working with STEP, IGES, JT, Parasolid, IFC, DXF, STL, glTF, or similar geometry formats.
Experience with Open Cascade, CAD Exchanger, HOOPS, Parasolid, or related geometry-processing technology.
Understanding of meshes, boundary representations, topology, tessellation, and geometric tolerances.
Experience building interfaces for large, complex 3D models.
Experience with Python, C++, Rust, Go, or another systems or backend language.
Experience with PostgreSQL and event-driven or asynchronous backend architectures.
Experience building software that interfaces with robotics, automation, sensors, or industrial equipment.
Experience with manufacturing workflows, work instructions, quality systems, or production operations.
Experience developing software for offline, edge, or intermittently connected environments.
Experience with role-based access, audit trails, revisions, and approval workflows.
Experience building software for high-mix manufacturing.
Familiarity with welding, fabrication, assembly planning, or dimensional inspection.
Experience processing or visualizing robot paths, coordinate frames, or sensor data.
Experience with desktop application frameworks such as Electron or Tauri.
Experience with geometry kernels or computational-geometry algorithms.
Experience building tools for engineers, scientists, or other expert users.
Experience integrating with ERP, MES, PLM, or document-control systems.
Experience building operational software used by technicians or factory personnel.
Experience working at an early-stage industrial, robotics, or defense technology company.
Contributions to relevant open-source graphics, CAD, or manufacturing-software projects.

Responsibilities

Build interactive applications for viewing and working with ship panels, structural assemblies, parts, welds, fixtures, and robotic operations.
Develop performant 3D visualization for large CAD-derived models.
Create tools for selecting, filtering, isolating, annotating, and inspecting parts and manufacturing features.
Display assembly sequences, weld paths, robot poses, toolpaths, work envelopes, and collision conditions.
Develop interfaces for reviewing the relationship between nominal CAD geometry and measured physical geometry.
Build visualization and debugging tools for coordinate frames, transformations, part locations, and sensor measurements.
Support section views, exploded views, clipping planes, measurement tools, and other engineering-oriented interactions.
Develop techniques for handling model simplification, level of detail, instancing, and incremental loading.
Build interfaces that remain usable when models contain thousands of parts and manufacturing operations.
Build workflows that take a customer model from import through manufacturing release.
Develop tools for reviewing automatically generated assembly, handling, welding, and inspection plans.
Allow engineers to understand why the system made a planning decision and modify it when necessary.
Build human-in-the-loop approval and exception-handling workflows.
Develop interfaces for identifying missing information, geometric conflicts, and manufacturing risks.
Support assignment of manufacturing attributes, process requirements, and acceptance criteria.
Create clear distinctions among draft, reviewed, approved, released, in-production, and completed states.
Build revision-control workflows for CAD models, manufacturing plans, and production instructions.
Ensure users can understand what changed between revisions and what production work is affected.
Develop production-readiness and engineering-release workflows.
Build operator-facing interfaces for staging, setup, execution, inspection, recovery, and rework.
Present the right information to operators without exposing unnecessary system complexity.
Develop job queues, production status, work instructions, and exception-management interfaces.
Build software for pause, resume, recovery, and escalation when an automated process cannot continue.
Display confirmed physical state rather than relying only on intended or commanded state.
Support software used on desktops, tablets, and factory-floor displays.
Design for unreliable network conditions, incomplete data, and work that crosses multiple shifts.
Build clear warnings, fault states, and recovery guidance.
Partner with robotics and automation engineers to connect product workflows to physical equipment.
Build data models for parts, assemblies, welds, jobs, operations, revisions, inspections, and nonconformances.
Capture the relationship among engineering intent, generated plans, executed operations, and inspection results.
Develop audit trails showing who changed, approved, or executed a manufacturing operation.
Support traceability for material, procedures, personnel, equipment, and quality records.
Build tools for reviewing actual cycle times, interventions, faults, rework, and production outcomes.
Develop APIs and services connecting product software to robotics, manufacturing, and business systems.
Help establish reliable identifiers and versioning across CAD, planning, and production data.
Build systems that make factory activity replayable and diagnosable.
Develop pipelines for importing and processing CAD and neutral geometry formats.
Extract parts, assemblies, surfaces, edges, features, metadata, and manufacturing annotations from engineering models.
Convert between boundary-representation, mesh, and visualization-friendly geometry where appropriate.
Maintain relationships between simplified visualization geometry and authoritative engineering geometry.
Develop geometry queries needed by product and manufacturing workflows.
Work with robotics engineers on interfaces between CAD geometry and motion or process planning.
Diagnose issues involving units, coordinate systems, tolerances, topology, and model quality.
Help define the canonical representation of a manufacturable structure within Valstad’s software platform.
Work directly with manufacturing engineers, operators, welding engineers, and robotics engineers to understand their workflows.
Observe how software is used on the factory floor rather than relying only on written requirements.
Turn ambiguous operational processes into clear product models and interfaces.
Prototype new workflows rapidly and test them with real users.
Partner with product design to establish interaction patterns for complex technical applications.
Balance flexibility for expert users with clear guidance for less experienced operators.
Build interfaces that reveal important system complexity without overwhelming the user.
Take ownership of features from initial discovery through deployment and continued improvement.
Design maintainable frontend and backend architectures for operationally important software.
Write production-quality TypeScript and other appropriate languages.
Build robust APIs, data models, and asynchronous workflows.
Develop automated unit, integration, and end-to-end tests.
Establish logging, monitoring, and diagnostic tools.
Design for cloud, on-premises, and edge-connected deployment environments.
Support secure access control and role-based permissions.
Participate in architecture reviews, code reviews, and technical planning.
Improve development tooling, deployment processes, and software reliability.
Help establish the technical foundation for a growing manufacturing-software platform.