About the role
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 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.
What We're Looking For
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 (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.
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.
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.
