Full-Time
Senior Software Engineer
CAD Interoperability
Updated on 9/3/2026
Zoo
51-200 employees
GPU-powered hardware design toolkit and services
Compensation Overview
$145k - $195k/yr
Remote in USA + 1 more
More locations: Los Angeles, CA, USA
Remote
Bachelor's
 Software Engineering |
|---|
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- A B.S. in Computer Science, Mechanical Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
- Strong professional experience in software engineering, ideally involving computer-aided design, geometry, file formats, code generation, or data extraction systems.
- Experience working with complex technical data formats, application application programming interfaces, software development kits, or translation pipelines.
- Proficiency in a systems programming language such as Rust or C++, with comfort working across language boundaries and vendor software development kits.
- Experience building automated tests, validation tools, and debugging workflows for complex technical systems.
- Ability to work autonomously, investigate unfamiliar systems, and make pragmatic technical decisions in a fast-moving environment.
- Design, implement, and maintain import pipelines that convert native and proprietary computer-aided design formats into Zoo's KCL.
- Build systems for extracting feature information from computer-aided design files and applications, including sketches, dimensions, constraints, parameters, feature trees, assemblies, metadata, product manufacturing information, and related design intent.
- Develop extractors using native computer-aided design application application programming interfaces and toolkits where interoperability software development kits are insufficient.
- Translate extracted computer-aided design structure, geometry, parameters, and feature information into KCL that faithfully represents the original model.
- Build validation, testing, and comparison tools to measure conversion quality across geometry, topology, feature information, assemblies, and generated KCL output.
- Handle edge cases across proprietary formats, computer-aided design versions, modeling kernels, malformed files, incomplete metadata, and inconsistent vendor application programming interface behavior.
- Collaborate with the file format, modeling, and product teams to improve Zoo's computer-aided design import experience and expand support for real-world customer files.
- Strong understanding of computer-aided design model structure, including parts, assemblies, sketches, constraints, dimensions, features, parameters, boundary-representation geometry, and tessellated representations.
- Experience with computer-aided design interoperability software development kits such as HOOPS Exchange, CoreTechnologie 3D_Kernel_IO, Open Design Alliance, CAD Exchanger, Datakit, or similar tools.
- Experience with native computer-aided design application programming interfaces such as SOLIDWORKS API, Creo TOOLKIT, NX Open, CATIA CAA/API, Inventor API, or similar.
- Experience with STEP, IGES, Parasolid, ACIS, JT, glTF, STL, or other computer-aided design and three-dimensional exchange formats.
- Experience generating structured source code from model data, especially for domain-specific languages or domain-specific modeling languages.
- Familiarity with KCL or other programmatic computer-aided design workflows.
KittyCAD.io provides infrastructure for hardware design, offering a GPU-powered engine with remote streaming and an Open API to support both pre-built tools and client-developed applications. Its Modeling AppPublic Alpha combines point-and-click CAD with code editing, and its Text-to-CAD interface helps automate workflows. The product suite accelerates design processes through machine learning and autoscaling infrastructure, while reducing hardware requirements and costs. KittyCAD.io differentiates itself with a GPU-accelerated, streaming-enabled platform that works across devices and operating systems, and by offering customizable tooling via an Open API, allowing hobbyists, startups, and enterprises to build, deploy, and scale hardware design tools more efficiently. The company’s goal is to save engineering time and resources, enable flexible tool development, and lower the barriers to hardware design by providing scalable, automated infrastructure.
Company Size
51-200
Company Stage
Seed
Total Funding
$5M
Headquarters
San Francisco, California
Founded
2021
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Simplify's Take
What believers are saying
- May 2025 launch of Zoo Design Studio expanded from alpha to subscription revenue.
- February 2026 Zookeeper and image-to-CAD upgrades deepen product stickiness and usage.
- SOC 2 Type II completion in 2026 unlocks enterprise procurement and regulated customers.
What critics are saying
- OpenAPI and self-hosted competitors can copy workflow integration by 2026-2027.
- Zoo's pricing still meters direct API usage, risking churn among high-volume developers.
- If Text-to-CAD adoption stalls, Zoo loses its core wedge against incumbents like Autodesk.
What makes Zoo unique
- Zoo Design Studio unifies point-and-click, code, and text prompts in one CAD environment.
- Zoo's GPU-based cloud geometry engine powers API-accessible, dynamically scalable hardware design workflows.
- Zookeeper embeds a conversational CAD agent directly into Zoo Design Studio, launched February 2026.
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Benefits
Health Insurance
401(k) Retirement Plan
Hybrid Work Options
Unlimited Paid Time Off
Remote Work Options
Stock Options
Competitive Equity
Wellness Program
Company News
The First Professional CAD Platform Powered by Generative AI LOS ANGELES, May 28, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Zoo, a company that creates infrastructure for hardware design, today announced the launch of Zoo Design Studio, a unified CAD suite for engineering and manufacturing companies of all sizes. Included in Zoo Design Studio is Text-to-CAD, a feature that enables design engineers to leverage the power of generative AI to create complex designs in seconds. The new service is available via subscription, starting from free and with advanced features included in paid tiers, from $99 per month. Zoo Design Studio allows customers to flexibly weave edits to their designs between traditional point-and-click interactions, programmatic interactions with code, and text prompt interactions via Text-to-CAD. This allows the customer to choose any of these three approaches within one common environment. Zoo Design Studio is built using their proprietary geometry engine, which is the world's first to be GPU-based, cloud-implemented, API-accessible, and dynamically scalable
KittyCAD Closes $5M Seed Financing Back to HomeMALIBU, CA, KittyCAD a company developing advanced tools for hardware design, has closed a $5M Series Seed financing led by Venrex Partners.KittyCAD a company developing advanced tools for hardware design, has closed a $5M Series Seed financing led by Venrex Partners, a UK-based Venture Capital firm. The round also included participation from USC's Viterbi School of Engineering, Gaingels, Kelvin Beachum, Matt Terrell, Undeterred Capital, Liquid 2, Tom Preston-Werner's Family Office, Madrona Venture Group, Bernie Lagrange, and Nat Friedman.(c)2011-2020 by Massinvestor, Inc. For contact info, please check out our about page
KittyCAD, a company that develops advanced tools for hardware design, has released geometry engine capabilities on its application programming interface.
/PRNewswire/ -- KittyCAD, the world's only company to develop advanced tools for hardware design, announced today the release of first-ever geometry engine...
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