← Kunstruct AI● ACTIVELY HIRING

Technical Co-Founder & CTO

📍 United States · Remote / Hybrid Flexible🗓 Onboarding within 1 to 3 months📈 Significant founding equity
About Kunstruct AI

Kunstruct AI is an AI copilot for hardware engineering teams. We bring a company's engineering knowledge, drawing standards, and manufacturability guidance directly into the CAD environment, so problems surface while the fix is still an edit rather than a change order.

Engineering teams lose hundreds of hours to review work that happens too late. Drawings leave review with missing callouts or wrong tolerances, and the real feedback arrives from a machinist or supplier after release, when correcting it costs a full redesign cycle. In our April 2026 survey, 79% of engineers reported hitting redesign loops after release.

April 2026 survey of 24 senior mechanical engineers.

We are building for automotive and vehicle platforms, industrial equipment, and medical devices first. The same checks apply to anything with fasteners, tolerances, and a drawing package.

Winner of the 2026 Kelley EVC Pitch Competition, with business development and strategic support from the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University. Delaware C-corp formation in progress, IP strategy underway, and groundwork laid for our institutional seed round.

Where we actually are

Being clear about this, because it defines the job.

There is a web-based drawing checker live at app.kunstruct.ai. It is free, and it exists to test demand and collect feedback on whether engineers want these tools at all. Early signal is good. It is a validation instrument, not the product.

The product is the copilot inside the CAD environment. Engineers do not want another browser tab. They want the checks, the standards, and the past-program knowledge available in the CAD session while they are still designing. Building that is the core technical challenge and the reason this role exists.

The roadmap behind it is the flow a design engineer actually runs: parsing customer requirements, matching against past programs and parts in PDM, recommending what has to change, running manufacturability analysis on live 3D geometry, and reviewing the drawing package. Plus the engineering work underneath: GD&T advisory, tolerance stack-ups, ECO generation, FAI packages, and inspection documentation.

We build to fit, not to replace

Every company has its own release process, build plan, and quality flow, on systems that took years to stand up. We never ask them to replace any of it. We configure around their gates, checks, and internal standards, and our tools read and write the documents their process already produces. Their CAD, PLM, MES, and QMS stay where they are.

That means building against the real stack: SOLIDWORKS, NX, Creo, and CATIA on the design side, and Teamcenter, Windchill, 3DEXPERIENCE, ENOVIA, and PDM Professional behind them.

This is how we win, and it is the part of the job that is genuinely hard. If custom-fitting an AI system into a different enterprise environment each time sounds like a nightmare, this is not the role. If it sounds like the interesting problem, keep reading.

The Role

You own the technical roadmap. Architect, build, and ship, from 0 to 1. You are not implementing someone else's spec. You work directly on product strategy, architecture, and customer validation, and you grow into the CTO seat as we scale and hire.

What you'd build
CAD-native tooling
Add-ins and integrations that put the copilot inside SOLIDWORKS and the other major CAD environments, running against live geometry and the active design session.
Multimodal vision on real drawings
Reading GD&T callouts, tolerance blocks, and title blocks at accuracy a professional engineer will trust.
A geometry pipeline
CAD file ingestion, tessellation, and analysis on 3D models rather than flat images.
Retrieval and agentic reasoning
Over engineering standards, ECO history, supplier lessons, and past-program data, plus PLM and PDM integration against the systems above.
Deployment enterprise IT will approve
On-premise and self-hosted, with zero data retention. Customers will not send proprietary designs to a public cloud.
The evaluation problem
A false negative on a manufacturability or compliance check is worse than useless here. Proving correctness is one of the hardest things you would own.
Key Qualifications
AI/ML architecture
A track record building and deploying production AI systems. Multimodal vision, LLMs, RAG, or agentic workflows. Early-stage startup experience strongly preferred.
Desktop and CAD integration
Experience building plugins, add-ins, or desktop applications, ideally against a CAD API such as the SOLIDWORKS API, NX Open, Creo Toolkit, or CATIA CAA. If you have not worked in CAD specifically but have shipped real integrations into someone else's desktop software, that translates.
Secure enterprise infrastructure
On-premise and self-hosted deployment, zero data retention, and building software that survives an enterprise IT and security review.
0 → 1 execution
Comfortable with ambiguity, moving fast, and turning vague customer pain into working software.

We can teach the mechanical engineering domain. We cannot teach the interest in learning it.

What We Offer
Significant founding equity
On standard four-year vesting with a one-year cliff, structured transparently based on experience, leverage, and contribution.
Compensation reality
We are pre-seed. Equity-first until institutional funding closes, and we will be straight with you about runway, milestones, and the path to salary from the first call.
A founder who has done the work
Kunstruct is founded by a mechanical design engineer with aerospace and defense experience at two Fortune 500 companies, who built and shipped the live tool himself. Domain expertise, customer access, fundraising, and the business side are handled. The technical build is open, which is the whole reason this role exists.
The practical details
  • Roughly 10 focused hours a week to start, going full time when funding closes.
  • US-based and able to relocate. Remote and hybrid flexible now, with New York or San Francisco likely as we scale.
  • Onboarding within one to three months.
Sound like you?
Try the drawing checker at app.kunstruct.ai, then send a short intro with something you've built: a repo, a demo, a paper. Tell us what you would change about what you saw. We reply to every serious note.
Apply for this role →
All third-party product names are trademarks of their respective owners. Kunstruct AI is an independent company, not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any of them.