Full-Time
Lead Delivery Engineer
Industrial
Updated on 9/12/2026
Luminary
51-200 employees
SaaS platform delivering HPC-driven industrial simulations
No salary listed
San Mateo, CA, USA
In Person
On-site in San Mateo, California; travel to customer sites is 10–25%.
Master's, PhD
 Solution Engineering (1) |
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- Five to ten years of experience in a technical role in a relevant industry, such as engineering, simulation, research and development, advanced engineering, technical program management, or applied artificial intelligence and machine learning.
- Fluency across multiple industrial engineering and multiphysics disciplines, including structural mechanics, thermal analysis, electromagnetics, rotating machinery, fluid dynamics, or multiphysics optimization.
- Strong hands-on engineering skills with Python, scripting, simulation tools, and artificial intelligence and machine learning workflows.
- Working knowledge of artificial intelligence and machine learning applied to engineering, including surrogate modeling, neural operators, physics-informed machine learning, or digital twins.
- Ability to lead cross-functional technical teams without direct authority.
- A track record of selecting appropriate problems to solve and delivering solutions that are adopted in practice.
- Ability to explain physics models to chief engineers and present customer roadmaps to company leadership.
- Willingness to travel 10–25% to customer sites.
- Own end-to-end customer outcomes across new and existing industrial accounts, from discovery and use-case scoping through model development, deployment, and integration into customer engineering workflows.
- Author Statements of Work, educate customers on engagement plans, and own delivery accountability against them.
- Lead a matrixed value-delivery team of Applications Engineers, Applied Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Scientists, Data and Platform Engineers, and selected product engineers by setting technical direction, sequencing work, and removing blockers.
- Run sprints, milestones, and risk management as a project manager while selecting use cases and shaping product direction as a product manager.
- Debug models, restructure data pipelines, and prototype workflow integrations.
- Work side-by-side with industrial engineers on use-case development, sharing knowledge and building trust through collaborative work.
- Partner with the go-to-market team on new-account engagement, go-to-market-to-delivery handoff, and account growth.
- Bring market and customer signals to Product and Research to shape the roadmap for industrial use cases.
- Principal-level candidates have an extensive track record in the industry.
- Prior experience at major industrial companies or enterprise software companies serving industrial sectors.
- Experience with engineering challenges involving rotating machinery, heat exchangers, pumps and compressors, or similar complex engineered products.
- A track record of driving technology adoption in industrial environments with measurable business impact, such as reduced development time, improved performance, or lower prototyping costs.
- Experience deploying machine-learning or simulation tooling into production engineering workflows.
Luminary Cloud offers a software-as-a-service platform that provides high-performance computing for industrial R&D. It delivers an interactive simulation, visualization, and analysis toolkit that achieves near-supercomputer performance without requiring expensive on-site hardware. Through a subscription model, customers gain ongoing access and updates, avoiding large capital investments in HPC infrastructure. The company focuses on aerospace, automotive, and advanced manufacturing, differentiating itself with strong performance, automation, and cloud scalability backed by expertise in computational physics and cloud computing.
Company Size
51-200
Company Stage
Series B
Total Funding
$187M
Headquarters
Palo Alto, California
Founded
2019
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Simplify's Take
What believers are saying
- March 2026 GeoTransolver retraining delivered up to 10x better accuracy across SHIFT models.
- January 2026 Series B funding from N47, Sutter Hill, and NVentures supports hiring.
- Private Cloud and defense-focused models open ITAR-bound budgets in 2026 and beyond.
What critics are saying
- Luminary still depends on external validation from Northrop Grumman and Sceye, not broad adoption.
- If NVIDIA changes PhysicsNeMo priorities, Luminary loses its core technical leverage quickly.
- A bad security incident would kill defense deployments and freeze revenue expansion entirely.
What makes Luminary unique
- SHIFT-Crash predicts full-vehicle crash response in seconds, not 10-hour finite-element runs.
- Luminary Private Cloud serves air-gapped defense and aerospace buyers inside classified perimeters.
- NVIDIA GeoTransolver adoption gives Luminary physics-AI credibility and tighter performance accuracy.
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Benefits
Hybrid Work Options
Growth & Insights and Company News
6 month growth
↑ 1%1 year growth
↓ -2%2 year growth
↓ -12%Luminary has launched SHIFT-Crash, the first Physics AI model that predicts full-vehicle crash response in seconds rather than hours. The model generates spatially resolved stress field predictions from vehicle design parameters, trained on 5,000 crash simulations based on the 2010 Toyota Yaris. Traditional finite element method simulations take 10 to 12 hours per crash test and must restart from scratch for each vehicle programme. SHIFT-Crash uses transfer learning to retain crash physics knowledge across programmes, reducing required simulations from 5,000 for an initial SUV programme to potentially fewer than 300 by the third iteration. The model demonstrates less than 3% root mean square error, enabling engineers to explore design variations earlier in development cycles and accelerate time to market.
Luminary Cloud has become the first Physics AI platform to adopt NVIDIA's GeoTransolver model architecture for computational fluid dynamics applications, achieving up to 10 times greater prediction accuracy. The technology enables engineering teams to model real-world product performance in seconds rather than weeks. Luminary has retrained its entire SHIFT model portfolio on the new architecture, providing customers with near-simulation-level precision across aerospace, automotive, turbomachinery, marine and space vehicle applications. The models are built on NVIDIA's PhysicsNeMo framework. "Engineering teams have historically had to choose between speed and accuracy," said Suds Menon, Luminary's chief product officer. "By working with NVIDIA and adopting the GeoTransolver architecture across our SHIFT models, we are eliminating that compromise." The advancement addresses a longstanding tradeoff in AI-driven design tools, where faster results typically meant lower accuracy.
Luminary adopts NVIDIA GeoTransolver AI model architecture, unlocking up to 10x greater accuracy in Physics AI. 03.16.2026 San Mateo, CA SAN MATEO, Calif., March 16, 2026 - Luminary Cloud, the leading Physics AI platform, today announced it is the first Physics AI platform to adopt NVIDIA's newest GeoTransolver model for CFD applications, delivering up to 10x greater prediction accuracy for its SHIFT models. This advancement enables engineering teams to model and test real-world product performance with significantly improved precision in seconds rather than weeks, eliminating traditional simulation costs and delays. The company provides engineering teams with ready-to-use Physics AI models built on NVIDIA's PhysicsNeMo framework. SHIFT offers high-precision, pre-trained models across aerospace, automotive, turbomachinery, marine, and space vehicle applications. By retraining its entire SHIFT model portfolio on the new GeoTransolver architecture, Luminary now offers immediate access to higher accuracy and performance. Engineering teams have historically had to choose between speed and accuracy. By working with NVIDIA and adopting the GeoTransolver architecture across its SHIFT models, Luminary Cloud, Inc. is eliminating that compromise. - Suds Menon, Chief Product Officer at Luminary The integration delivers measurable advantages across the SHIFT model portfolio: * External aerodynamics surrogates with maximum accuracy for aerospace, defense, automotive, and industrial sectors * Pre-trained SHIFT models for fluid dynamics, multiphysics, and structural mechanics * Enhanced performance with 45% to 138% speedup on SHIFT-Wing using the newest PhysicsNeMo release "AI-driven simulation is redefining how manufacturing industries design and deliver increasingly complex products," said Tim Costa, VP and general manager of computational engineering at NVIDIA. Customer Application: Sceye Sceye, an aerospace company developing stratospheric platforms for connectivity, earth observation, and climate research, is using Luminary's Physics AI to rapidly evaluate platform performance and refine designs. Leveraging GeoTransolver, Sceye is accelerating design exploration and optimization for its next-generation stratospheric airship. About Luminary Cloud Luminary Cloud is a Physics AI platform for rapid design iteration, exploration, and optimization. Customers span industries from aerospace and automotive to advanced manufacturing, including Northrop Grumman, Otto Aviation, Joby Aviation, Piper Aircraft, and Trek Bikes. For more information, visit www.luminarycloud.com.
Luminary has launched Luminary Private Cloud, an on-premises deployment of its Physics AI platform designed for secure, air-gapped defence and aerospace environments. The system enables high-performance simulation and AI-driven engineering within organisations' own secure perimeters, addressing data sovereignty and classified workflow requirements. The platform delivers the same capabilities as Luminary's cloud-hosted service, including AI-driven simulation, model training and inference, whilst operating entirely within restricted environments. It builds on existing ITAR-compliant deployment options and SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certifications. The launch reflects growing demand for deployable AI solutions in regulated industries where public cloud infrastructure is prohibited. The system maintains consistency with Luminary's SaaS platform and enables potential future hybrid deployments between private and public infrastructure.
Luminary Cloud expands physics AI toolkit with defense-focused models. The company designed its new SHIFT models to address collaborative combat aircraft, autonomous submarines, and fluid dynamics challenges. Luminary Cloud has released three new artificial intelligence models focused on different defense technology development needs. The company has developed what it calls physics AI, which can speed work on complex engineering problems such as aerodynamics, structural analysis, electromagnetics, and heat transfer. In October, Luminary signed a partnership with Northrop Grumman to work on rocket nozzle designs. With Monday's announcement, Luminary has released three more AI models under its SHIFT brand name: * SHIFT Collaborative Combat Air to help optimize the aerodynamic performance of drone prototypes intended to fly alongside crewed fighter jets. * SHIFT Submarine will focus on hydrodynamic efficiency and performance of autonomous vessels including battery capacity, which can limit the length and duration of missions. * SHIFT Pump, which is a model to optimize a new design for pumps including pressure, flow, and efficiency. "To outpace adversaries, physics AI is not optional - it is a mission-critical necessity. Platforms like Luminary are essential for compressing design timelines and securing the technological edge," said Juan Alonso, chief technology officer at Luminary. The new models expand upon the previously released SHIFT-SUV and SHIFT-Wing models for automotive and aerospace applications. SHIFT is a family of models that provide access to both high-quality datasets and pretrained models for a variety of applications and industries.