Remote
US
$165K–$175K
💻Engineering
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Important: Applying to this role will also allow us to consider you for other research opportunities at Vizcom. We believe the best roles are shaped around exceptional people, not just job descriptions.
Vizcom is where design teams at companies like Nike, GM, New Balance, and Hasbro bring ideas from sketch to product. Designers use Vizcom to sketch, render, explore color and materials, work in 3D, and prepare concepts for production.
The render itself was never the point. The point is the physical thing that comes after it. We call this pencil to product.
Vizcom is a Series B company with more than $52M raised from investors including Radical Ventures, Index Ventures, Unusual Ventures, and Basis Set.
Visualization has advanced quickly. Making has not.
Between a beautiful render and a part a factory can actually produce sits a difficult set of problems: meshes that aren't solid, surfaces that can't be edited, geometry that doesn't reflect how products are manufactured, and softgoods that render convincingly but can't yet be translated into patterns, seams, or knit structures.
Our customers design shoes, cars, power tools, toys, and other physical products, and their needs make the gap clear. Engineering teams need generated 3D geometry detailed and structured enough to hand off to mechanical engineers. Designers still trace curves from generated orthographic views into NURBS software. Color and material teams need to explore dozens of variations while preserving the underlying product geometry exactly.
A render tells you what something looks like. Manufacturing requires a description of what it actually is: form, material, dimension, behavior, and the technical artifacts that carry those decisions downstream.
Geometry is the spine of that chain, but it's only one part of it.
The representations, benchmarks, and workflows that will ultimately connect generative design to manufacturing are still being defined. This role will help define them.
As a Research Engineer, Design to Manufacturing, you'll work on closing the distance between pixels and atoms.
You'll own an emerging research direction at Vizcom focused on moving generated design concepts toward physical production: determining which parts of that chain we should attack first, which representations are worth betting on, and how we define and measure whether an output is actually useful downstream.
Geometry is likely where the work begins. It isn't necessarily where it ends.
You'll work alongside researchers focused on post-training and engineers building the data systems that capture how professional designers work. Together, the goal is to close the loop between designer intent, model behavior, physical constraints, and manufacturability.
Over time, manufacturability itself can become a signal models learn from, while designer intent becomes a constraint on the geometry they generate.
If you're primarily interested in making generated images look better, this probably isn't the role for you.
If you're interested in getting from a sketch or generated concept to something an engineer, pattern maker, or factory can actually use, it might be.
We don't have a predetermined answer for which representations will win. Meshes, implicit fields, parametric surfaces, B-reps, CAD operation sequences, or approaches that haven't yet emerged are all possibilities.
We're interested in what survives contact with the real world.
This is a charter, not a week-one checklist. We don't expect one person to solve every part of the design-to-manufacturing chain at once. A meaningful part of the role is determining where to start and which problems are worth solving first.
Immerse yourself in current customer workflows, Vizcom's 3D systems, existing failure cases, and the handoffs between designers and downstream engineering or manufacturing teams.
Talk directly with the people doing the work and understand where today's workflows break down.
Take one real customer workflow and remove or materially improve one manual step from it, end to end.
Develop an initial design-to-manufacturing research roadmap: which parts of the chain we should pursue, in what sequence, which representations appear most promising, and how we'll measure progress.
A desire to connect research directly to real product and customer workflows.
Above all, we're looking for someone who judges a generated model not only by how it looks, but by whether it could actually exist.
Direct access to the founders: You'll work closely with Vizcom's founders and technical leadership as we build out this research area.
Monthly gym membership stipend
We regularly benchmark compensation against relevant peer companies using current market data from industry-standard sources, including Carta and Pave. This range reflects our Tier 1 compensation market, which includes San Francisco.
The actual offer and overall compensation package will be determined based on multiple factors, including relevant experience, skills, qualifications, and business considerations. The compensation and benefits described in this posting apply to U.S.-based W-2 employees and may vary based on applicable employment laws and requirements.
This is an in-person role based in San Francisco, CA.
At Vizcom, we move quickly, give people meaningful ownership, and offer the opportunity to shape both our product and our company as we grow. We believe deeply in the craft of industrial design and in building tools that help designers bring better ideas into the physical world.
Please apply directly through this job posting. To help us keep our hiring process fair and organized, we ask candidates not to contact Vizcom employees directly regarding their application or candidacy.
Vizcom is not seeking assistance from external recruiting agencies or search firms for this role. Please do not contact or solicit Vizcom employees regarding recruiting services, candidate submissions, or agency partnerships. Unsolicited resumes or candidate profiles submitted by agencies will not create a fee obligation on behalf of Vizcom.
As part of Vizcom's SOC 2 Type II compliance program, employment is contingent upon successful completion of a background check, as permitted by applicable law.
USD 230,000 - 320,000
Annually
