Research Engineer, Design to Manufacturing

Research Engineer, Design to Manufacturing

San Francisco, CA
· In Person
· Full-Time

Applying to this role will also allow us to consider you for other research opportunities  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 contribute to an emerging research direction at Vizcom focused on moving generated design concepts toward physical production. You'll take on meaningful technical problems across geometry, representation, materials, and manufacturability, working with the team to test approaches and understand which ones are useful in real design and engineering workflows.

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.

• Design-to-manufacturing research: Own scoped research and engineering problems that help move generated concepts toward physical production, from initial exploration through evaluation and implementation.

• Geometry: Explore and prototype approaches for translating generated 3D into editable, manufacturable geometry, including parametric surfaces, curve extraction, reconstruction, and CAD handoff.

• Material and color: Contribute to approaches that connect rendered appearance to real-world specifications, including materials, finishes, color, and other physical properties.

• Softgoods: Investigate challenges unique to products that are sewn, knit, or otherwise constructed from flexible materials, including pattern generation, seam logic, drape, and fit.

• Manufacturability: Explore ways to incorporate physical constraints such as manifoldness, tolerances, wall thickness, structure, drape, and fit into generation and evaluation.

• Production-ready outputs: Build and evaluate approaches for producing artifacts downstream teams can use, including CAD files, patterns, specifications, and technical documentation.

• Evaluation: Develop benchmarks and evaluation methods that help us understand whether generated outputs are useful in downstream design, engineering, and manufacturing workflows.

• Customer pilots: Work with real customer workflows as test cases, translating recurring problems into experiments and technical requirements.

• The…