Senior Softgoods Digital Design Engineer

As a Digital Design Engineer on the Softgoods team, you’ll be the senior surface modeler who turns NEO’s industrial design intent into production-grade digital geometry. Working primarily in Autodesk Alias (A-Surface / B-Surface / Class-A), you’ll build the high-quality surfaces behind every part people see and touch, the soft covers, trims, foams and molded elastomers that make a humanoid robot feel welcoming at home. You’ll sit between industrial design and engineering, translating sketches, clay, and scan data into precise, manufacturable surfaces, and carrying that geometry through tooling release and into mass production. Every Class-A surface you create must integrate seamlessly and functionally with NEO, flowing cleanly into adjacent parts while respecting the robot’s joints, range of motion, sensors, thermal paths, and serviceability. Your surfaces become the single source of truth that patterns, molds, fixtures, and parts are built from. This is a fully on-site role, as the best work in this field happens collaboratively with surfaces reviewed against physical prototypes, hands on materials, ideas advancing quickly., * Own Class-A surface development for NEO’s softgoods and touch-facing components delivering G2/G3-continuous, highlight-clean surfaces that match design intent and are released on schedule.

• Ensure every Class-A surface integrates” with “Integrate every Class-A surface seamlessly and functionally with NEO: consistent gaps, flush and continuous transitions to adjacent rigid and soft parts, and full clearance for articulation, sensors, cooling, and service access across the robot’s range of motion.
• Translate industrial design concepts, sketches, clay, and 3D scan data into precise digital models, accountable for design fidelity from first concept through tooling release.
• Drive surface feasibility for manufacturing with draft, parting lines, shut-offs, wall thickness, and material behavior for molded foams, elastomers, and textile-wrapped parts so tooling is committed with minimal rework.
• Deliver clean, well-structured digital data to engineering, tooling partners, and vendors, owning the handoff from Alias into parametric CAD and complex lattice structures.
• Set the team’s digital surfacing standards with quality checks, modeling workflows, and data structure, raising the surfacing skill of the people around you.

Key Competencies

• Expert Class-A surfacing senior-level fluency in Autodesk Alias, building production-quality surfaces with controlled curvature, clean highlights, and G2/G3 continuity, verified through zebra, highlight, and curvature analysis.
• Design-intent fidelity: a trained eye for form, proportion, and reflection; able to read a sketch or clay model and capture its character precisely, then hold that character through engineering changes.
• Surfacing for manufacture: understands how surfaces become tools and parts (draft, parting lines, tooling splits, shrink) and how soft materials (foams, elastomers, textiles) stretch, compress, and wrap over rigid structure.
• Data pipeline mastery: moves geometry cleanly between Alias and parametric CAD (SolidWorks, NX, On-shape), scan data, and complex lattice structure tools, keeping models organized and downstream-ready.
• Cross-functional collaboration: works fluidly with industrial designers, softgoods and mechanical engineers, and tooling partners, giving clear feedback on feasibility while protecting design intent.

• 7+ years of professional Class-A surface modeling in Alias and/or ICEM Surf.
• Proven track record of shipping production surfaces in consumer products, automotive, footwear, or another high-finish industry
• Portfolio showcasing your professional surfacing work, personal projects, and passion projects (highlight/zebra renders encouraged) Able to work fully on-site in San Carlos, * Experience designing complex lattice structures and conforming them to Class-A surfaces for additively manufactured soft and rigid parts
• Experience in 3D scanning and reverse engineering workflows (e.g., Geomagic, PolyWorks)
• Familiarity with visualization in VRED, KeyShot, or Blender for design reviews
• Experience creating accurate color and texture/bump maps that replicate complex materials such as knits, leathers, foams, and elastomers for true-to-life visualization
• Familiarity with mold design, tooling, and GD&T for molded and over-molded parts

• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage
• Generous paid time off, company holidays, and parental leave
• 401(k) plan with company match (100% on the first 3% of contributions, 50% on the next 2%)
• Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA) and Health Savings Accounts (HSA) options
• Commuter benefits (transit and parking)
• Short-term and long-term disability, and life insurance
• Employee Assistance Program (EAP) for mental health, financial, and personal support
• Onsite snacks and catered lunches, Compensation Range: $175K - $215K

We’re building humanoid robots that work in home doing the chores, handling the tasks, and giving people their time back. Simple, but it’s not.

To do this right, we have to solve robotics, AI, manufacturing at the same time, at scale, in a form factor that has to be safe enough to live with your family. If you’re inspired by this, you’ll thrive here. We’ve been at this since 2014 and we’re at the point where the hard problems are behind us and the hard work is in front of us.

NEO is our flagship, a general-purpose robot designed to move, learn, and operate in the real world alongside real people. We’re not demoing it, we’re shipping it. We’re excited to meet you if this excites you.

If you’ve spent your career working on problems that matter and want to see them actually reach the world - this is that moment. We’re scaling, we’re hiring with intention and we need people who want to build something that will genuinely change how humans spend their time - safely creating abundance for all., The Softgoods team is a group of makers, engineers, and designers united by a passion for creating products people love to touch, trust, and use. We bring together rigid and soft materials, textiles, elastomers, and foams, pairing traditional techniques with the exotic and unexpected, always with safety, a soft-touch experience, and a warm, welcoming feel at our core, carrying” with “. Safety, a soft-touch experience, and a warm, welcoming feel are at our core as we carry every product from first concept through prototyping to full mass production.