Research Engineer, Design to Manufacturing

About this role

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 at Vizcom. We believe the best roles are shaped around exceptional people, not just job descriptions.

ABOUT VIZCOM

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.

THE ROLE

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.

WHAT YOU'LL OWN

- The design-to-manufacturing roadmap: Map the path from generated concept to physical product, identifying which problems are tractable now and which require longer-term research.

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

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

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

- Manufacturability: Bring physical constraints such as manifoldness, tolerances, wall thickness, structure, drape, and fit into the generation process rather than treating them solely as downstream repair problems.

- Production-ready outputs: Define and build toward the artifacts downstream teams actually consume, including CAD files, patterns, specifications, and technical documentation.

- Evaluation: Establish what "production-ready" or "factory-acceptable" means for different product categories and build evaluation methods around those standards.

- Customer pilots: Use real customer workflows as test cases and turn recurring problems into research questions.

- The research feedback loop: Partner with our ML data and post-training teams so physical constraints, designer judgment, and model behavior can eventually inform one another.

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.

WHAT YOUR FIRST 90 DAYS COULD LOOK LIKE

Days 1–30: Understand

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.

Days 30–60: Demonstrate

Take one real customer workflow and remove or materially improve one manual step from it, end to end.

Days 60–90: Set direction

Develop an initial design-to-manufacturing research roadmap: which parts of the chain we should pursue, in what…