Founding Software Engineer

Napkin Labs is out to collapse the design-to-manufacturing cycle for the teams behind aircraft, rockets, reactors, and cars. Our AI agents do real engineering work across the CAD, simulation, PLM, and ERP tools engineers already use, and we’re going into production with our first paying customers.

We’re a team of AI engineers and rocket scientists from Stanford and NASA.

You’ll be a core architect and technical owner of Napkin Labs, reporting directly to our CEO and working side by side with our R&D engineers and customers. It’s deeply hands-on: you’ll write a lot of code, make big architecture calls, and debug strange failures in customer environments.

Your mission: take our agents from prototype to production, and keep them there.

• The product, end to end. Everything from the React app to the FastAPI services, data model, and deploy stack.
• The agent runtime. Durable, stateful workflows with tool use, retries, budgets, evals, guardrails, citations, and human review. Agents that still work on run 500, not just in the demo.
• The connectors. Reliable integrations with Siemens NX, Teamcenter, and other engineering tools, including legacy APIs and systems inside customer networks.
• The backbone. Multi-tenancy, long-running jobs, hybrid cloud/on-prem execution, security, observability, and infra as code. The unglamorous stuff that gets enterprise security teams to say yes.
• The engineering culture. Design docs, code review, standards, and hiring and mentoring the team that follows.

We care more about depth than a perfect keyword match. You’re deep in at least one of these, and we won’t complain if it’s all three:

• Architect or tech lead. You’ve designed and shipped enterprise SaaS that customers depend on: APIs, data models, distributed systems, security, the works.
• Full-stack builder. You ship polished product end to end, from React and TypeScript to Python (or similar), without dropping quality anywhere.
• AI harness engineer. You’ve built production agents and the harnesses around them, not prompt wrappers. You know how they break and how to keep them honest.

Whatever your spike, you finish what matters, and you’re at home with containers, cloud, and CI/CD.

• Industrial software. Siemens NX, Simcenter, SOLIDWORKS, Ansys, or other CAD/CAM/CAE tools.
• Enterprise systems. PLM, ERP, or MES integrations (think Teamcenter or SAP).
• Regulated environments. ITAR/EAR, AWS GovCloud, FedRAMP, or CMMC.
• Engineering data. 3D geometry, requirements, BOMs, digital threads, or retrieval over giant technical documents.
• Behind the firewall. Windows services, desktop integrations, or secure connectors that run inside customer networks.

• You will be defining a new software category at the boundary of AI and the physical world.
• You will be one of the first hires at a well-funded, fast-moving startup and can define your own role trajectory, with meaningful influence over the product, architecture, and engineering culture.
• You will have massive impact within the company and in the broader engineering space, shaping our product roadmap and building the tools that help build the next generation of rockets and hardware faster.

Apply → email careers@napkinlabs.com