The Role

Valstad is seeking a Product Software Engineer to build the software layer connecting customer CAD models, manufacturing planning, robotic execution and factory operations.

You will develop interactive 3D applications and technical workflows used by manufacturing engineers, robotics engineers, weld engineers, operators and quality personnel. These tools will help users understand complex steel structures, review automatically generated manufacturing plans, resolve exceptions, release work to production and track what actually happened on the factory floor.

This role sits between traditional full-stack product engineering and engineering software. You will work with CAD-derived geometry, large 3D models, production data, process state and physical equipment. You should be comfortable building polished user experiences while also reasoning about geometry, revisions, coordinate systems, manufacturing constraints and backend orchestration.

The ideal candidate is a strong product-minded software engineer who enjoys turning complex technical processes into clear, reliable tools. You do not need prior shipbuilding experience, but you should be excited to learn how physical products are designed, assembled, welded, inspected and delivered.

What You Will Build
CAD and 3D Manufacturing Applications

• Build interactive applications for viewing and working with ship panels, structural assemblies, parts, welds, fixtures and robotic operations.
• Develop performant 3D visualization for large CAD-derived models.
• Create tools for selecting, filtering, isolating, annotating and inspecting parts and manufacturing features.
• Display assembly sequences, weld paths, robot poses, toolpaths, work envelopes and collision conditions.
• Develop interfaces for reviewing the relationship between nominal CAD geometry and measured physical geometry.
• Build visualization and debugging tools for coordinate frames, transformations, part locations and sensor measurements.
• Support section views, exploded views, clipping planes, measurement tools and other engineering-oriented interactions.
• Develop techniques for handling model simplification, level of detail, instancing and incremental loading.
• Build interfaces that remain usable when models contain thousands of parts and manufacturing operations.

Manufacturing Planning Workflows

• Build workflows that take a customer model from import through manufacturing release.
• Develop tools for reviewing automatically generated assembly, handling, welding and inspection plans.
• Allow engineers to understand why the system made a planning decision and modify it when necessary.
• Build human-in-the-loop approval and exception-handling workflows.
• Develop interfaces for identifying missing information, geometric conflicts and manufacturing risks.
• Support assignment of manufacturing attributes, process requirements and acceptance criteria.
• Create clear distinctions among draft, reviewed, approved, released, in-production and completed states.
• Build revision-control workflows for CAD models, manufacturing plans and production instructions.
• Ensure users can understand what changed between revisions and what production work is affected.
• Develop production-readiness and engineering-release workflows.

Factory and Operator Software

• Build operator-facing interfaces for staging, setup, execution, inspection, recovery and rework.
• Present the right information to operators without exposing unnecessary system complexity.
• Develop job queues, production status, work instructions and exception-management interfaces.
• Build software for pause, resume, recovery and escalation when an automated process cannot continue.
• Display confirmed physical state rather than relying only on intended or commanded state.
• Support software used on desktops, tablets and factory-floor displays.
• Design for unreliable network conditions, incomplete data and work that crosses multiple shifts.
• Build clear warnings, fault states and recovery guidance.
• Partner with robotics and automation engineers to connect product workflows to physical equipment.

Production Data and Traceability

• Build data models for parts, assemblies, welds, jobs, operations, revisions, inspections and nonconformances.
• Capture the relationship among engineering intent, generated plans, executed operations and inspection results.
• Develop audit trails showing who changed, approved or executed a manufacturing operation.
• Support traceability for material, procedures, personnel, equipment and quality records.
• Build tools for reviewing actual cycle times, interventions, faults, rework and production outcomes.
• Develop APIs and services connecting product software to robotics, manufacturing and business systems.
• Help establish reliable identifiers and versioning across CAD, planning and production data.
• Build systems that make factory activity replayable and diagnosable.

CAD and Geometry Processing

• Develop pipelines for importing and processing CAD and neutral geometry formats.
• Extract parts, assemblies, surfaces, edges, features, metadata and manufacturing annotations from engineering models.
• Convert between boundary-representation, mesh and visualization-friendly geometry where appropriate.
• Maintain relationships between simplified visualization geometry and authoritative engineering geometry.
• Develop geometry queries needed by product and manufacturing workflows.
• Work with robotics engineers on interfaces between CAD geometry and motion or process planning.
• Diagnose issues involving units, coordinate systems, tolerances, topology and model quality.
• Help define the canonical representation of a manufacturable structure within Valstad's software platform.

Product and Interaction Development

• Work directly with manufacturing engineers, operators, welding engineers and robotics engineers to understand their workflows.
• Observe how software is used on the factory floor rather than relying only on written requirements.
• Turn ambiguous operational processes into clear product models and interfaces.
• Prototype new workflows rapidly and test them with real users.
• Partner with product design to establish interaction patterns for complex technical applications.
• Balance flexibility for expert users with clear guidance for less experienced operators.
• Build interfaces that reveal important system complexity without overwhelming the user.
• Take ownership of features from initial discovery through deployment and continued improvement.

Software Engineering

• Design maintainable frontend and backend architectures for operationally important software.
• Write production-quality TypeScript and other appropriate languages.
• Build robust APIs, data models and asynchronous workflows.
• Develop automated unit, integration and end-to-end tests.
• Establish logging, monitoring and diagnostic tools.
• Design for cloud, on-premises and edge-connected deployment environments.
• Support secure access control and role-based permissions.
• Participate in architecture reviews, code reviews and technical planning.
• Improve development tooling, deployment processes and software reliability.
• Help establish the technical foundation for a growing manufacturing-software platform.

Initial Priorities
First 30 Days

• Learn Valstad's current CAD-to-production workflow.
• Observe engineers and operators using the existing robotic manufacturing system.
• Understand the current geometry, planning, robotics and production software architecture.
• Review the formats and structures of customer CAD data.
• Identify the largest usability and workflow gaps between engineering intent and factory execution.
• Ship an initial improvement to an existing production workflow.

First 90 Days

• Develop an improved 3D interface for reviewing parts, welds and generated manufacturing operations.
• Establish reusable frontend patterns for technical and manufacturing workflows.
• Improve the process for importing, validating and displaying customer models.
• Build or improve workflows for reviewing and releasing manufacturing plans.
• Connect key software states to actual robotics or production-system states.
• Add logging and analytics that reveal where users encounter exceptions or manual work.
• Establish a prioritized roadmap for the CAD and manufacturing product platform.

First Six Months

• Deliver an end-to-end workflow from imported CAD model through reviewed manufacturing plan and production release.
• Enable engineers to review and modify generated assembly and welding plans in an interactive 3D environment.
• Reduce the amount of manual data translation and informal coordination required to start a production job.
• Improve visibility into revisions, approvals, execution status and production exceptions.
• Establish reliable links among CAD entities, manufacturing operations and physical production records.
• Deploy operator-facing software used during active production.
• Help make new customer parts easier and faster to introduce into Valstad's system.

Required Experience

• Four or more years of professional software-engineering experience.
• Strong experience building production web applications.
• Strong proficiency with TypeScript and modern frontend frameworks such as React.
• Experience building interactive graphical or data-intensive applications.
• Experience designing and implementing backend APIs and data models.
• Strong understanding of application state, asynchronous workflows and distributed systems.
• Experience owning features from requirements through production deployment.
• Strong product judgment and attention to interaction details.
• Ability to work directly with highly technical users and domain experts.
• Ability to reason clearly about complex workflows, state transitions and exception paths.
• Experience writing automated tests and debugging production systems.
• Willingness to work on-site and spend time with engineers and operators on the factory floor.

Strongly Preferred

• Experience with Three.js, React Three Fiber, Babylon.js, WebGL or another real-time 3D graphics framework.
• Experience developing CAD, CAM, PLM, BIM, simulation, digital-twin or engineering software.
• Experience working with STEP, IGES, JT, Parasolid, IFC, DXF, STL, glTF or similar geometry formats.
• Experience with Open Cascade, CAD Exchanger, HOOPS, Parasolid or related geometry-processing technology.
• Understanding of meshes, boundary representations, topology, tessellation and geometric tolerances.
• Experience building interfaces for large, complex 3D models.
• Experience with Python, C++, Rust, Go or another systems or backend language.
• Experience with PostgreSQL and event-driven or asynchronous backend architectures.
• Experience building software that interfaces with robotics, automation, sensors or industrial equipment.
• Experience with manufacturing workflows, work instructions, quality systems or production operations.
• Experience developing software for offline, edge or intermittently connected environments.
• Experience with role-based access, audit trails, revisions and approval workflows.

Additional Differentiators

• Experience building software for high-mix manufacturing.
• Familiarity with welding, fabrication, assembly planning or dimensional inspection.
• Experience processing or visualizing robot paths, coordinate frames or sensor data.
• Experience with desktop application frameworks such as Electron or Tauri.
• Experience with geometry kernels or computational-geometry algorithms.
• Experience building tools for engineers, scientists or other expert users.
• Experience integrating with ERP, MES, PLM or document-control systems.
• Experience building operational software used by technicians or factory personnel.
• Experience working at an early-stage industrial, robotics or defense technology company.
• Contributions to relevant open-source graphics, CAD or manufacturing-software projects.

Shipbuilding experience is not required. We care more about strong product engineering, technical curiosity and evidence that you can make complex engineering workflows understandable and reliable.

What Success Looks Like

Success means that a customer CAD model can move through Valstad's system without relying on spreadsheets, screenshots, manually coordinated files or undocumented expert knowledge.

Engineers can clearly understand the