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Salary: USD 250,000 - 450,000 / annual
Vizcom is a Series B design-to-manufacturing platform used by design teams at Nike, GM, New Balance, and Hasbro. The company has raised over $52M from top-tier investors including Radical Ventures, Index Ventures, and Unusual Ventures.
As a Research Engineer, you'll own the visualization-to-actualization chain—the gap between beautiful renders and factory-acceptable parts. This is a frontier research role focused on closing the distance between pixels and atoms across multiple dimensions: geometry processing, material and color specification, softgoods (pattern flattening, seam logic, knit), and manufacturability constraints.
You'll work on form (converting generated 3D to editable, manufacturable geometry via parametric surfaces and CAD handoff), material and color (translating rendered appearance to real-world specifications), softgoods engineering, and building manufacturability into the generation loop itself rather than as a post-hoc repair step. You'll also define the output layer—the artifacts downstream teams consume (CAD files, pattern pieces, tech packs) and establish the evaluation bar for factory-acceptable outputs per vertical.
The role is structured as an open research direction with a product attached. You'll map the chain from render to real, identify which links are attackable now versus future bets, and sequence the work. You won't work in isolation: a preference-data engineer captures how designers work, and post-training engineers model designer choices. You make those choices physically real, closing the loop so manufacturability becomes a learnable signal.
In your first 90 days, you'll immerse in customer asks and the current pipeline, demonstrate impact by removing one manual step from a real workflow end-to-end, and chart the actualization roadmap with clear sequencing and success metrics.
You should be deep in at least one link of the chain (geometry processing, appearance modeling, cloth simulation, or computational fabrication) with working fluency across others. You need hands-on experience with modern generative or reconstruction methods and the engineering chops to turn research papers into production pipelines. You're comfortable being first—there's no inherited research log here.
Nice-to-haves include CAD kernel or B-rep experience, color science, physical simulation at product speed (cloth, FEA), or having shipped or watched a physical product through handoff. The disposition that matters most: you judge a generated model by whether it could exist, not by how it looks.
