The last four interviews we have published, together with the two keynotes, give a reasonable picture of the breadth and depth of the program.

Isogeometric analysis removing meshing blockers from CAD-to-simulation workflows, agentic AI inside a structural engineering practice, generative design constrained by robotic assembly, quantum algorithms for CFD, AI-generated flight structures at NASA, and the software stack behind humanoid robots at Boston Dynamics.

Six talks, six different points of entry into the same set of problems: how computational tools move from research into production, and what changes when AI/Machine Learning is inserted and accelerates that pipeline.

The evening session moves from the engineering and software detail of the day into policy, with a fireside conversation between Rep. Chrissy Houlahan and Dr. Will Roper and a live UAS redesign demo.

It is DC coming to CDFAM this year as much as the other way around.

Matthew Sederberg, Coreform.

Isogeometric analysis, and specifically the removal of manual meshing from CAD-to-simulation workflows. Sederberg’s point is not that IGA is faster. It is that meshing is the step that breaks the link between CAD and everything downstream, including an agent’s ability to reason about a design. Take that step out and the loop closes. Coreform’s approach has been to integrate into Abaqus rather than compete with it, which is its own lesson in where the leverage actually sits.

Sergey Pigach, CORE studio, Thornton Tomasetti.

A return visitor, this time on agentic systems in structural engineering. Pigach is candid that TT is not yet comfortable running fully autonomous agents on real projects, and the interview is mostly about why: auditability, deterministic tooling, and a threat model that treats an agent less like software and more like an insider with legitimate access. Also covers MOMENT, their internal benchmark for how far LLMs get on structural problems with nothing but a calculator and a sandbox.

Alexander Htet Kyaw, MIT.

Generative AI applied to discrete robotic assembly, not text-to-3D. The distinction matters. A mesh that looks right is not the same as an object that can be fabricated, and Htet Kyaw’s work is about building that constraint back in early, rather than treating fabrication as a downstream problem to be solved after the fact.

William Steadman, Quanscient.

Quantum algorithms for CFD. Where current quantum hardware actually sits relative to GPU and CPU simulation (behind, and clearly stated as such), what a hybrid classical-quantum workflow looks like in practice, and how IBM and IonQ architectures change the formulation of the same problem.

Four talks. Simulation infrastructure, structural engineering practice, fabrication-constrained generative design, and quantum hardware for physics. That range is the point of the event.

The policy evening. DC is coming to CDFAM this year, not the other way around. The evening session is a free, government-focused program built around a fireside conversation between Rep. Chrissy Houlahan and Dr. Will Roper, alongside a live UAS redesign demo running through Istari Digital, nTop, Arena Physica, C-Infinity, Luminary, and SysGit. If you work in or around defense and aerospace procurement and have not registered for this piece specifically, it is free and it is worth your evening.

Keynotes.

Ryan McClelland, NASA Goddard. Text To Spaceship: Accelerating Mission Development With AI.

McClelland has already demonstrated AI generating optimized flight structures from requirements, lighter and stronger, in days rather than months. The talk covers what it takes to scale that from a single bracket to full payload designs: a secure, cloud-deployed ecosystem of AI-accessible design, analysis, and manufacturing tools, with requirements defined in language flowing through automated systems end to end. Read the interview.

Brian Ringley, Boston Dynamics. Authoring Autonomy.

Ringley’s argument is that hardware capability is not the constraint. Boston Dynamics has the most dynamic humanoid platform available, and that is not enough on its own. The harder problem is the software: brains trained on large data sets rather than programmed, where spatial reasoning cannot be scraped from the internet the way text can. The talk covers the tooling required to close that gap, agentic sandboxes where operators teach robots by physical demonstration, describe tasks in natural language, and refine generative robot behavior directly.

Registration and the full program are at cdfam.com/cd-dc-26.

Ahead of his presentation at CDFAM and his participation in the CD/DC real-time AI-augmented engineering demo for government observers, Juan Alonso discusses Luminary’s Physics AI models, which replace meshing and solving with a near-instant inference loop.

Alonso, who chaired Stanford’s Department of Aeronautics & Astronautics for three years and previously directed NASA’s Fundamental Aeronautics Program, describes an approach that generalizes across regimes as different as UAVs, submarines, and supersonic missiles.

The models bypass the meshing and convergence steps that have historically made multi-physics workflows slow and labor intensive:

“Imagine being able to perform multi-objective design optimization of an aircraft by coupling aerodynamics and structural analysis in seconds, as opposed to weeks with traditional simulation methods.”

On why this matters beyond commercial aerospace, Alonso points to defense applications specifically:

“I aim to share how the thoughtful combination of Agentic AI and Physics AI is emerging as the most important strategic capability for the Department of Defense and Intelligence Community in the past 3 decades.”

The interview covers how engineers validate Physics AI predictions against traditional CFD, what training data looks like for models that need to generalize across flow regimes, and what it takes to connect aerodynamic and structural analysis into a single workflow.

Read the full interview here: https://cdfam.com/luminary/

Read Full Interview

To learn directly from Juan about Physics AI applications for aerospace & defense, you can apply for an in-person meeting at CD/DC at this link: https://events.luminary.ai/cdfam-dc-26

30 Minute Meeting with Juan

After a full day of talks at CDFAM across computational design, the CD/DC evening session opens with a fireside chat between U.S. Representative Chrissy Houlahan and Dr. Will Roper, CEO of Istari Digital and former Air Force acquisition chief.

A SPECULATIVE DEMO

Six different software companies will then take a full aircraft design, change it, and re-certify it for manufacturability and safety. In real time.

• nTop geometry

• Luminary. aerodynamics

• Arena Physica. electromagnetics

• C-Infinity. assembly

• SysGit. systems engineering

• Istari Digital. the connective tissue

TWO OPTIONS TO ATTEND

INDUSTRY & ACADEMIA

Seats are limited.

Join the full symposium →

GOVERNMENT OBSERVERS

The evening session is free.

Reserve a free evening seat →

See you in DC.

If you’re looking for work or looking for people, here is where it’s at.

The people hiring are the people presenting in DC.

Several companies presenting at CD/DC 26 in Washington this July are actively recruiting. If you’re attending, you’ll be in the same room as the people actually doing the work, not just hiring managers.

Boston Dynamics have the most open roles on the board right now:

• Reinforcement Learning & Controls Research Scientist, Spot Behavior

• Staff Full Stack Software Engineer, Orbit Platform

• Atlas Senior Staff Systems Engineer in Software

• Sr. Staff Software Engineer, Perception and Safety R&D

• Staff Gear Train Engineer, Atlas Actuation Technology

• Senior Staff Mechanical Engineer, Atlas Structures

• Research Scientist, Reinforcement Learning (Atlas)

• Senior Staff Manufacturing Engineer, Atlas

• Senior Manager, Mechanical Engineering, Atlas

On the software side, nTop is building out infrastructure for large-scale parallel computation:

• Engineering Manager, Workload Orchestration

• Senior Software Engineer, Infrastructure (Dev/Platform)

• Engineering Manager, Distributed Computing Platform

• Director of Technology Partnerships

• Staff Product Designer

SimScale is expanding its North America enterprise team:

• Senior Enterprise Solution Engineer, North America

Thornton Tomasetti / CORE studio is hiring for its AI and computational design work:

• CORE Studio Computational Design Intern

Metafold is building out its geometric intelligence platform:

• Senior Full Stack Developer

Neural Concept is looking for a senior account executive with a CAD/CAE background to lead enterprise sales in the US.

CD/DC 26 is July 15-16 in Washington DC. These companies will have people in the room. If you’re hiring, this is where your next candidate will be. If you’re looking, this is where to start the conversation.

Opportunities are Expanding.

Across aerospace and defense, there are open positions in electromagnetic design, structures, harnessing, and advanced R&D engineering, reflecting continued demand at the intersection of simulation-driven design and manufacturing.

Physical AI and robotics roles are appearing from multiple companies: senior robotics research engineers, ML researchers focused on physical AI, and agentic design engineers working at the edge of what AI can do in a design loop.

Additive manufacturing roles continue to come in at both the process engineering and senior development level, with companies hiring across the R&D-to-production spectrum.

Footwear and consumer product design roles are also represented. Computational design has a broader industrial footprint than the aerospace-heavy conference agenda might suggest.

The full list, all 65+ roles, is at cdfam.com/careers.

Join us at CDFAM in DC

Matt Shomper was part of the very first CDFAM in NYC, with one of the more technically deep and openly philosophical talks we have run, somehow threading Mantis Shrimp, trail branches read as wayfinding, and spinal implants into a single argument about geometry.

Before that he was in our nTop “After Dark” showcase, where geometry experts demoed their experiments, everything from over-engineered skateboard trucks to visual ASMR. What that night hinted at, and what Matt has been chasing since, is the intuition you build about math, geometry, and engineering performance when the feedback is real time.

Read Full Interview

In DC this July he returns to that idea, this time with a nemesis: the Bighorn Sheep, and the horn it evolved to repeatedly headbutt an opponent at full force without (apparently) scrambling its own brain. The horn survives because of how it is formed, not what it is made of, and Matt’s work is an attempt to design that deliberately rather than just bewilderingly admire it.

To do that he built F13LD, a suite of browser based tools, free to use, for synthesizing and evaluating metamaterial geometry and its performance. The tools homogenize as you edit, so you watch the directional stiffness surface change shape instead of comparing the endpoints of a batch of FEA runs. As Matt puts it:

“The interesting behavior lives in the transitions, and you only find it by watching the structure move.”

That real-time view doubles as a teaching tool, and Matt is deliberate about keeping it open:

“I’d rather hand someone a thing they can take apart than a black box.”

As a primer to his DC presentation I asked him six questions, covering where architected materials actually pay for themselves, how data moves from a CT scan to a machine ready 3MF file, and what real-time homogenization reveals that batch analysis hides.

Read the full interview here: https://cdfam.com/shomper-26/

The questions in there may not be the ones you have for Matt.

If not, join us in DC, July 15-16, and ask him in person.

Register to attend CDFAM DC: https://cdfam.com/cd-dc-26/#register

Register to Attend

Early bird registration for CDFAM Computational Design Symposium closes today, June 15. After today, the standard rate of $1,250 applies.

Early Bird Registration

The Program

CD/DC brings together practitioners working at the intersection of computational design, AI, simulation, and advanced manufacturing, with an extended program connecting industry, academia, and U.S. government.

Keynote presentations confirmed:

Ryan McClelland, Research Engineer, NASA Goddard -- Text to Spaceship: Accelerating Mission Development with AI

Brian Ringley, Boston Dynamics -- Authoring Autonomy

Additional presentations include:

Pratap Ranade, Arena Physica -- Artificial Intuition: Building an AI Mind for Electromagnetic Design and Engineering

William Steadman, Quanscient -- Solving Aerodynamics Problems with Quantum Computers

Chris Helmerich, CTO, Celedon Solutions -- From Requirements to Manufacturable Systems: Agentic AI on a Live Engineering Knowledge Graph

Rahima Mohammed, Distinguished Engineer, Vinci4D -- Continuous Physics Reasoning: Always-On Design Infrastructure

Andreas Vlahinos, CTO, Advanced Engineering Solutions -- Optimal Lattice Selection for PCM Thermal Management

Damola Michael + Elliot Glassman, CannonDesign -- Before the Model: Aurora as AI-Grounded Climate Intelligence for Early-Stage Design

Along with presentations from Brandon DeMille (General Atomics Aeronautical Systems), Jan Vandenbrande(nTop), Giorgia Cannici (Virginia Tech), Rebeka Melber (Istari Digital), Sai Nelaturi (C-Infinity), Matthew Sederberg (Coreform), Alexander Htet Kyaw (MIT), Michael Bogomolny (InfinitForm), Francis Bitonti (Lexset), Sergey Pigach (Thornton Tomasetti CORE Studio), Matt Ellis (Neural Concept), Andrew Acuff (SimScale), Daniel Hambleton (Metafold), Steve Massey (SysGit), Matthew Shomper (Not a Robot Engineering), Juan Alonso(Luminary), Rik Baruah + Neel Goldy Kumar (Intact Solutions), Rhushik Matroja (Cognitive Design Systems), and Alexander Lavin (Pasteur Labs).

See Full Program

Registration

Early Bird: $850 -- today only
Standard: $1,250 (from June 16)
Academic: $550 (until July 1)
Team (4+): $650 per person (until July 10)
Government evening sessions: Free for Government Observers

Register to Attend

The latest roles span defense contractors, new space, autonomous maritime systems, humanoid robotics, eVTOL aircraft, engineering software and academic research.

See All Open Roles

Presenting at CD/DC Washington, and Hiring

Several companies on the CD/DC Washington speaker roster are still actively hiring. If you want to understand what they are building and who they are looking for, come hear them present.

Vinci4D — 14 roles across GPU solver architecture, CFD, geometry/meshing, thermal-mechanical simulation, and foundation model infrastructure.

PhysicsX — Head of People Partnership as they scale their AI simulation platform.

Arena Physica — Research Scientist, Machine Learning and Member of Technical Staff – Agentic Reasoning & Core Capabilities. Building electromagnetic superintelligence for hardware verification.

Neural Concept — ML for CAX Application Engineer, Application Engineer, and Tech Lead, Vertical Solutions.

nTop — Field Solutions Engineer and Senior Manager, Aerospace & Defense Business Development.

Celedon — Agentic Systems Engineer, Full-Stack Software Engineer, and two summer internships.

InfinitForm — Software Engineer, FEA & Structural Optimization and Product & Content Marketing Manager.

Boston Dynamics — Seven Atlas roles across reinforcement learning, perception, agentic systems, structures, and manufacturing.

Thornton Tomasetti — Computational Mechanics (FEA) Engineer, Washington DC. Advanced FEA for defense, infrastructure, and energy clients.

Browse all at cdfam.com/careers →

See the Full Program

Defense and Aerospace

Shield AI have five roles posted, a clear signal of scale-up across V-BAT and Hivemind programs. Principal Aerostructures Design Engineer, Engineering Manager Structural Design, Power Electronics Thermal Engineer, Principal Engineer AI Infrastructure, and Senior Engineer Mission Systems – Avionics & Sensor Integration.

Lockheed Martin now has three computational designer roles live simultaneously including two Houdini-based procedural modeling positions and a fully remote agentic systems engineering role. Plus the Advanced Factory & Design Lead at Sikorsky, additive manufacturing development, and thermal simulation engineering.

Draper — Sr. Electromagnetic Design Engineer, Cambridge MA. Precision inertial instruments for guidance applications ranging from ballistic missiles to miniature guided munitions.

Anduril, Northrop Grumman, and other defense roles from May remain open. View all →

New Space

SpaceX — Harnessing Design Engineer, Starlink. Electro-mechanical wire harness design in NX for the world’s largest satellite constellation.

Stoke Space — Senior Structures Design Engineer for 100% reusable rockets.

Lanteris Space Systems — Sr. Structures Design Engineer. Spacecraft structures for a company with 60 years of mission systems heritage.

Robotics, Autonomy, and Physical AI

McKinsey — Specialist, Robotics and Physical AI. Multi-physics simulation, digital twins, and physics-informed ML applied to industrial client challenges. An unusual entry for a consulting firm.

ABB Robotics — AI Adoption Lead for R&D, global role. Leading AI integration into engineering workflows across all global R&D sites as SoftBank consumes ABB Robotics.

Saronic Technologies — Industrial Designer, Austin TX. Applying premium product design standards to next-generation autonomous maritime systems — Rhino, KeyShot, CMF.

Also still open: Apptronik, Agility Robotics, Physical Intelligence, and General Motors robotics roles.

Advanced Manufacturing

Fabri — Software Engineer, Generalist. Building the software stack for a digital foundry combining additive manufacturing and precision metal casting. Early-stage, well-capitalized, onsite Boston.

VulcanForms — Additive Manufacturing Technician and Additive Manufacturing Specialist, Devens MA. Hands-on LPBF operation supporting applications development and production.

Industrial and Product Design

Meta — Industrial Designer, XR Hardware, Redmond WA. Category-defining consumer electronics and wearables. 10+ years experience expected.

Joby Aviation — Senior Industrial Designer. Cabin interiors, CMF, and Class-A surfacing for an eVTOL aircraft approaching FAA certification.

Research and Academic

Politecnico di Milano — PhD Scholarship, Physics-Informed Generative AI for Architected Materials. Generative deep learning and multi-physics inverse design of metamaterials. Joint with AI4I.

TU Delft — PhD Position, Textile-Form Weaving Design Methods. Digital design-fabrication workflows for zero-waste woven garments. Part of the INTERWeuVEN Horizon Europe project. Deadline June 29.

The people hiring for these roles are the same people who show up at CDFAM.

If you want to understand what they are actually building and who they are looking for, CDFAM Washington is where that conversation happens , not through a job description filtered by HR, but directly with the engineers and leaders doing the work.

Register for CD/DC Washington →

Browse all open roles →

Registration for Government Observers

A reminder that early bird registration for CD/DC closes Sunday, June 1.

Group rates are available for registrations of 4 or more from the same organization.

The two-day program takes place in the Union Market district of Washington, DC, with an evening demonstration session on July 15 open to government employees at no cost.

What the program looks like

The program is shaped around how computational design, simulation, and AI are actually being deployed across aerospace, defense, robotics, architecture, and software.

Ryan McClelland of NASA delivers the keynote. Two years on from his “Text to Spaceship” talk at CDFAM NYC, the update covers how AI-driven workflows from systems requirements to mission-ready hardware have moved from speculative to demonstrable.

Brandon DeMille from General Atomics Aeronautical Systems on topology optimization in aerostructure conceptual design, specifically the compression of time between initial concept and informed engineering decision.

Pratap Ranade from Arena Physica with Atlas RF Studio now in public beta, putting AI-driven electromagnetic design into the hands of practitioners rather than researchers.

Brian Ringley from Boston Dynamics on the shift from programming humanoid robots to teaching them, and what that requires of the underlying AI architecture.

Marta D’Elia from Atomic Machines on the Matter Design Engine, a workflow that turns informal descriptions into manufacturable MEMS 2.0 devices while keeping AI in a constrained, physics-grounded role.

Giorgia Cannici from Virginia Tech on magnetotropic plants engineered so their growth direction can be steered in real time through externally applied magnetic fields. Not an immediate application area, but a worthwhile lens on where continuous differential material systems are heading.

Speakers from Thornton Tomasetti, Neural Concept, SysGit, Luminary, Istari Digital, Pasteur Labs, MIT, CannonDesign, Lexset, SimScale, Intact Solutions, Cognitive Design Systems, Stantec, and Not a Robot Engineering complete the program. A few sessions are still being finalized.

Full program

Evening demonstration, July 15

A live integration of six tools from Istari Digital, Arena Physica, Luminary, nTop, C-Infinity, and SysGit, showing an end-to-end workflow that updates a UAS design and re-certifies it for manufacturability and safety in less time than it takes to assemble an Ikea bookshelf.

Government employees attend the evening session at no cost.

Register

Hiring activity in the field

The CDFAM job board added more than 100 roles this month. Many come from companies presenting at CD/DC, and as many again from companies attending. Anduril, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman alone account for over 20 open positions spanning hypersonic thermal engineering, sensor fusion, additive manufacturing, agentic AI, and digital thread integration. Simulation engineers, computational designers, AI/ML researchers, and advanced manufacturing specialists remain in active demand across defense, aerospace, robotics, architecture, and industrial software. AI is creating these roles, not displacing them.

Register to Attend

Happy Saturday, the CDFAM job board has added over 100 roles this month!

Many of them are coming from companies presenting at CD/DC in Washington this July, (check out the overview of the program, it is going to be pretty amazing, robots, rockets, magnetic plants, architectural beams and etc…) and from companies in the audience who are hiring just as actively with dream jobs.

The demand is definitely increasing, AI is helping to create, not taking these jobs away.

Simulation engineers, computational designers, AI/ML researchers, and advanced manufacturing specialists are all in high demand across defense, aerospace, robotics, architecture, and industrial software.

On the defense side, Anduril, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman collectively account for over 20 roles spanning hypersonic thermal engineering, sensor fusion, additive manufacturing, agentic AI systems, and digital thread.

These are not backfill positions replacing retiring engineers.

They reflect significant investment in the future tools and methods that will define how the next generation of design, engineering and architectural systems are built.

Presenting at CDFAM in Washington, and Hiring

Vinci4D — 14 roles across GPU solver architecture, CFD, geometry/meshing, thermal-mechanical simulation, foundation model infrastructure, and full-stack software.

Celedon — Multiple positions from full time agentic systems engineers to interns

Neural Concept — Three roles: ML for CAX Application Engineer, Application Engineer, and Tech Lead, Vertical Solutions

nTop — Field Solutions Engineer (Remote) and Senior Manager, Aerospace & Defense Business Development.

InfinitForm — Software Engineer, FEA & Structural Optimization and Product & Content Marketing Manager.

Boston Dynamics — Seven Atlas roles posted this month across reinforcement learning, perception, agentic systems, structures, and manufacturing.

Arena Physics - Multiple roles building electromagnetic superintelligence.

Thornton Tomasetti — Engineer Co-op, Immersive Experiences. Developing real-time security and digital twin experiences in Unreal Engine from Revit models, within CORE studio.

Browse all at cdfam.com/careers →

Defense and Aerospace

Anduril Industries is hiring across simulation, structural analysis, thermal engineering for hypersonic vehicles, and digital manufacturing. The breadth reflects a company in serious production scale-up mode across air, space, and maritime domains.

Lockheed Martin — Multiple roles including the Advanced Factory & Design Lead at Sikorsky (shaping next-generation automated rotorcraft manufacturing, additive manufacturing development, AI/ML research engineering, and a fully remote agentic systems engineering role.

Northrop Grumman — Mechanical MBE CAD/PLM Tools Engineer focused on digital thread maturation between engineering and manufacturing, plus two additive manufacturing engineering roles in Baltimore.

Relativity Space is hiring at the director and senior director level across tooling and avionics hardware. Isar Aerospace posted a structural manufacturing technician role.

AI Tools for Engineering

The most concentrated cluster of open roles this month. Several major technology companies are hiring specifically at the intersection of AI and engineering simulation.

OpenAI — Advanced Packaging Multi-Physics Modeling Engineer. Thermal, mechanical, and electrical co-simulation for next-generation AI chip packaging.

Apple — FEA/AI Methods Engineer. Developing AI/ML methods to accelerate structural simulation across iPhone, Mac, Apple Watch, and Vision Pro.

Synopsys (Ansys) — R&D Staff Engineer, AI/ML Discrete Geometry Processing. Mesh generation, surface reconstruction, GPU-accelerated simulation.

AI Fund — Engineer in Residence: CAD AI. 12-week residency building a text-and-image-to-parametric-CAD system, with co-founder potential if the concept validates.

Also: NVIDIA, Stability AI, Autodesk, Cadence, MathWorks, and AVEVA.

Probably Project Prometheus, if you know anyone there?

Robotics

Simulation and mechanical engineering roles across the humanoid robotics space this month.

Boston Dynamics posted seven Atlas roles — reinforcement learning, perception, agentic systems, structures, and manufacturing. See the CD/DC section above.

Apptronik — Three simulation-focused mechanical engineering roles in Austin: Hardware Simulation Manager, Mechanical Engineer – Thermal Simulation & Analysis, and Senior Mechanical Engineer – Structural Simulation & Analysis.

Agility Robotics — Senior AI Research Engineer and Mechanical Engineer – Actuators, across Fremont CA, Salem OR, and Pittsburgh PA.

Physical Intelligence — Mechanical Design Engineer, San Francisco.

General Motors — Automotive Robotics Researcher, Warren MI. Ph.D.-level role in kinematics, motion planning, sim-to-real, and multi-robot systems.

Additive Manufacturing

VulcanForms — Director, Additive Machine Build, Devens MA. Leading build, commissioning, and qualification of next-generation laser metal AM capacity at scale.

Nordex — Engineer Blade Structures, Hamburg. FEA and structural analysis of fibre-reinforced composite wind turbine blades.

Computational Design and Architecture

SOM, Ennead, Populous, and Boskalis all posted computational designer roles this month ranging from early career in NYC and Kansas, to a senior role embedding computational workflows into large-scale civil infrastructure in the Netherlands.

Automotive and Industrial Design

Ford posted four roles across digital modelling, Class A surfacing, and powertrain structures. BMW’s Design Studio has a six-month computational design internship starting September in Munich. Airbus posted an industrial designer role in Toulouse.

Lutron is looking for a Distinguished Engineer to teach mechanical design craft to junior engineers with 25+ years of experience expected, so expertise is not being replaced by AI.

Attend CD/DC to Connect with the CDFAM Community

The people hiring for these roles are the same people who show up looking for talent at CDFAM.

If you want to understand what they are really looking for from the person you will actually work with, CD/DC Washington is where you can get the real role requirements they can’t always articulate in a job description that has been diluted and homogenised by HR and then screened by dumb AI.

If you are looking to hire, the best of the best attend CDFAM conferences, whether you are looking to find a brilliant, motivated PhD student from the volunteers helping out at the event, or poach a seasoned (but not yet jaded) veteran from the stage, CDFAM has the highest density of intellectual curiosity and expertise in the world of advanced engineering.

Looking forward to seeing you there.

Register to Attend

The CD/DC program brings together engineering practitioners, software developers, and researchers to present current work in computational design, simulation-driven engineering, AI-assisted workflows, and data-centric approaches to engineering problems across aerospace, defense, infrastructure, manufacturing, and energy.

Confirmed speakers represent organizations including NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Boston Dynamics, General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Atomic Machines, Neural Concept, Coreform, InfinitForm, Pasteur Labs, SimScale, Lexset, Virginia Tech, and Thornton Tomasetti, among others.

The format follows the established CDFAM structure: practitioners presenting real work to a technically qualified peer audience.

Full CD/DC Program

An evening session for government observers

On July 15, beginning at 5:00 PM, there is a dedicated evening session open to registered government observers at no cost.

The session is built around a live demonstration.

Six AI-native engineering tools: Istari Digital, Arena Physica, Luminary, nTop, C-Infinity, and SysGit will operate together as an interoperable stack.

The demonstration will show how these tools can integrate new sensor and compute data, update a complete UAS design, and re-certify it for manufacturability and safety in a single connected workflow, in real time.

Each participating organization addresses a different layer of the engineering stack: digital thread management, electromagnetic design, multi-domain physics optimization, implicit-function-based geometry, assembly configuration, and systems engineering integration.

The demonstration is not about any one tool. It is about what becomes possible when they work together.

The evening format includes networking and direct access to the engineers and developers running the demonstration.

The evening event complies with Widely Attended Gathering guidelines as specified by the legislative and executive branches of the United States Government.

Who should attend

The full two-day program is for engineers, researchers, and software developers working in or adjacent to the problem domains on the agenda.

Previous CDFAM attendees have come from organizations including Airbus, BMW, Sandia National Laboratories, Nike, NASA, New Balance, Samsung, BIG, HP, Apple, Lockheed Martin, GM, Princeton, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, NVIDIA, Siemens, GE, IDEO, Carbon, Foster + Partners, ARUP, Stryker, Tiffany, Relativity Space, Blue Origin, DARPA, INQTEL, USAF, US Navy, ORNL, and many more.

The evening session is specifically intended for government observers: program managers, contracting officers, policy staff, and technical advisors who need a firsthand look at where AI-native engineering workflows currently stand and what integration between tools looks like at program scale.

Registration for government observers is now open: https://cdfam.com/cd-dc-registration/

Details

• Full program: July 15-16, 2026

• Evening session (government observers, no cost): July 15, 5:00 PM

• Location: Station DC, 1323 4th St NE, Washington, DC 20002

• Registration and program details: cdfam.com/cd-dc-26

Register to Attend

Greg Grigoriadis of Metisec describes a design toolkit that replaces fixed inputs with statistical distributions and runs Monte Carlo simulations across the resulting parameter space. The output is a probabilistic picture of performance: failure probabilities, sensitivity rankings, and the specific conditions that actually drive risk.

A sensor mounting bracket for a smart wearable serves as the test case. Traditional optimization cut bracket weight by 30%. Probabilistic analysis revealed the design had been tuned to an improbable drop event and still carried unresolved thermal failure risk. Incorporating that information allowed the team to re-optimize and achieve a 50% weight reduction at a demonstrably low failure probability.

Greg is an engineering consultant specializing in consumer electronics, digital twin technologies, and advanced simulation workflows. His practice combines physics-based modeling with data-driven methods across finite element analysis, predictive maintenance, and automated computation pipelines.

Presented at CDFAM Barcelona 2026. Learn more at cdfam.com.

A roundup of roles posted to the CDFAM job board since April 1st, spanning simulation infrastructure, AI-driven geometry, additive manufacturing, robotics, and computational design in architecture and industry.

Presenting at CD/DC Washington, and Hiring

Several companies on the CD/DC Washington speaker roster are actively building their teams.

Come hear them present July 15-16, 2026. If you want to work on what they’re building, the roles are on the board now.

• Arena Physica — simulation, electrical engineering, and systems deployment

• Atomic Machines — engineering, robotics software, and manufacturing (10 open roles)

• Boston Dynamics — Atlas mechanical, manufacturing, RL research, perception, and agentic systems

• CDS — Computational Design Engineer

• InfinitForm — Product & Content Marketing Manager

• Luminary — Software Engineer, Product

• nTop - Senior Manager, Aerospace & Defense Business Development

• Pasteur Labs — Platforms Engineer + PhD/SWE internships

• PhysicsX — Head of People Partnership

• Vinci4D — GPU solvers, CFD, meshing, foundation model architecture, thermal simulation (14 roles!!!)

Browse all roles at cdfam.com/careers →

Also on the Board

X (Alphabet) — Rapid Evaluator, Future of Compute — Mountain View, CA Moonshot ideation across post-silicon compute, HPC, and additive nanomanufacturing. $221k–$328k. View role →

Stability AI — Research Scientist, Controlled 3D Generation — Remote Diffusion and flow-matching for controllable 3D content. Meshes, Gaussians, NeRFs, differentiable rendering. View role →

Synopsys (Ansys) — R&D Staff Engineer, AI/ML Discrete Geometry Processing — Canonsburg, PA AI/ML applied to mesh generation, surface reconstruction, and GPU-accelerated simulation. $120k–$180k. View role →

AVEVA — Fellow, Emerging Technology Trends — San Francisco / Philadelphia / Boston Senior foresight role forecasting industrial technology shifts over a 3–7 year horizon. $293k–$489k. View role →

NVIDIA — AI for Design Engineer — Santa Clara, CA. $136k–$264k. View role →

Lockheed Martin — Multiple roles across additive manufacturing, AI/ML, thermal simulation, sensor fusion, and F-35 simulation labs.

Amazon — Multiple roles across robotics simulation, thermal design, and Annapurna Labs hardware.

Relativity Space — Tooling, avionics, additive manufacturing, and a Moonshot Engineer position.

General Motors — Computational Mechanics and CAD Researcher View role →

Joby Aviation — Additive Design Engineer — Marina, CA View role →

LEGO Group — Lead Engineer, Additive Manufacturing View role →

OXMAN — Computational Ecologist + Machine Learning Research Engineer

SOM — Junior Computational Designer, Architecture — New York, NY View role →

Populous — Computational Designer (Early Career) View role →

Nike (Jordan Brand) — Expert 3D Footwear Designer, Jordan 3D Studio View role →

Booz Allen Hamilton — Modeling and Simulation Software Engineer View role →

Browse all open roles at cdfam.com/careers →

Job boards are one thing. But if you are serious about where your career is heading in computational design, simulation, and AI engineering, there is no substitute for being in the right place at the right time .

The CDFAM audience is not a general tech crowd.

It is researchers, engineers, founders, and technical leads who are actively working at the edges of what computational tools can do, across aerospace, automotive, architecture, robotics, manufacturing, and beyond. Many of them are hiring. Many of them are looking for collaborators, not just employees. And almost none of those conversations ever even make it to a published job listing.

The people on stage represent some of the most consequential work happening in this field right now.

But the conversations that tend to matter most happen between sessions, over lunch, and at the end of the day, with the person sitting next to you who turns out to be building exactly the thing you have been thinking about.

If you are looking for your next role, your next collaborator, or simply a clearer sense of where the field is going and who is driving it.

CDFAM is where those connections get made.

See The Full CD/DC Program

Tilman Steininger, Customer Success Manager for Agentic Engineering at Synera, and Juan De Dios Escribano Felguera, Team Lead for Body-in-White and Corrosion Development at SEAT/CUPRA, present their collaborative work digitizing structural development workflows across the full BIW development cycle. Recorded at CDFAM Barcelona 2026.

About CDFAM

The CDFAM Computational Design Symposium is a global conference series bringing together researchers, engineers, and software developers working at the intersection of computational design, AI and machine learning for engineering and architecture. The program spans computational geometry, generative design, topology optimization, simulation-driven workflows, and advanced manufacturing across scales from architected materials to architectural systems. CDFAM events are held worldwide.

cdfam.com

The first recordings from the event are now available on the CDFAM YouTube channel.

The opening session from NVIDIA’s Pablo Hermoso Moreno covers AI surrogate models, accelerated physics solvers, and agentic CAE workflows, drawing on his background in Formula 1 aerodynamics and large-scale cloud AI deployment.

Mike Frei of ARENA Physica follows with the case for a foundation model for electromagnetism, addressing how geometry governs electromagnetic behavior and where current simulation workflows fall short for semiconductor, aerospace, and automotive applications.

Hao (Richard) Zhang from Augmenta and Simon Fraser University presents work on functional AI for 3D design automation in the built environment, including the first buildings in the world with electrical systems delivered by AI-powered generative design.

Raul Llamas-Sandin from Airbus and Universidad Europea de Madrid presents a GPU-accelerated topology optimization solver capable of handling structural synthesis problems with millions of elements in minutes on a workstation, with applications in bridge design, high-rise structural cores, and architectural form-finding.

Closing out the first batch, Johannes Mueller-Roemer from Fraunhofer IGD introduces SubSimX, a subdivision-native design and simulation pipeline that eliminates the mesh rebuild cycle, enabling continuous simulation-driven iteration directly on the control mesh.

More sessions will be released in the coming weeks that will join recordings from previous events in NYC, Berlin and Amsterdam.

The CDFAM series continues later this year.

CD/DC takes place July 15-16 in Washington DC, with a program focused on computational design and engineering AI across defense, aerospace, and government applications.

CDFAM Tokyo follows October 15-16 at the Tokyo International Forum, marking the first CDFAM event in the Asia-Pacific region.

Registration to attend and speaker presentation submissions for both events are available at cdfam.com.

In this episode recorded at CDFAM Barcelona 2026, Johannes Mueller-Roemer presents SubSimX, a pipeline that addresses this by treating subdivision surfaces as a native simulation medium rather than a preprocessing step. Designers work on a standard Catmull-Clark control mesh. Meshing and boundary condition setup happen once. From that point, geometry edits propagate to the existing analysis mesh in seconds, structural feedback is continuous, and the design session never has to stop for remeshing.

The technical core is a precomputed mapping between the control mesh and the volumetric interior, combined with a local mesh-repair step that maintains element quality through large deformations without changing mesh topology. Coupled with RISTRA, Fraunhofer’s GPU-accelerated FEM solver, the system delivers real-time or near real-time structural feedback. Johannes demonstrates how this enables dense design sweeps, topology optimization followed by subdivision refinement, and AI-in-the-loop exploration within practical industrial workflows.

Johannes Mueller-Roemer is Deputy Head of Interactive Engineering Technologies at the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research IGD. He received his PhD from TU Darmstadt in 2019, where his dissertation introduced GPU data structures for tightly coupled modeling and simulation — the foundation SubSimX is built on.

Recorded at CDFAM Barcelona 2026 — https://cdfam.com/barcelona-2026/

In this episode recorded at CDFAM Barcelona 2026, Raul C. Llamas-Sandin presents a GPU-accelerated solver that addresses this directly, reducing solve times for large-scale problems to minutes on a workstation. He covers the key technical features that make it relevant for the built environment: asymmetric tension-compression stress constraints, thermoelastic analysis, and geometric constraint enforcement for fixed architectural elements and fenestration.

Applications demonstrated include bridge design and high-rise structural cores at spans up to 80 meters, as well as free-form architectural geometries exported as watertight STL files ready for digital fabrication. The solver’s modular configuration approach decouples problem definition from the numerical backend, making it adaptable across project types without reengineering the workflow.

Raul is a Future Projects Engineer at Airbus Operations SL and Assistant Professor of Aerospace Engineering at Universidad Europea de Madrid, with over two decades of experience in advanced aircraft design. He holds an MSc in Aerospace Vehicle Design from Cranfield University and 14 patents spanning aerodynamic devices and plasma actuation.

Recorded at CDFAM Barcelona 2026 — https://cdfam.com/barcelona-2026/

In this episode recorded at CDFAM Barcelona 2026, Richard introduces Functional AI as a framework for 3D design automation and walks through Augmenta’s work applying it to real building projects. The technical scope covers agentic AI for MEP path finding, generative modeling of complex structural and mechanical layouts, and progress toward a foundation model for building data. He also discusses what makes non-residential construction — commercial, medical, institutional, and mission critical — a particularly hard problem for AI systems to crack.

The conversation closes on a concrete milestone: two elementary schools in Michigan where the electrical system was fully modeled and delivered using AI-powered generative design, a first for the industry.

Hao (Richard) Zhang is VP of AI and R&D at Augmenta and a Professor in the School of Computing Science at Simon Fraser University. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, a member of the ACM SIGGRAPH Academy, and served as Technical Papers Chair for SIGGRAPH 2025.

Recorded at CDFAM Barcelona 2026 — https://cdfam.com/barcelona-2026/

Mike brings an unusual combination of deep physics intuition - PhD from Columbia studying geometry and electron behavior at the molecular scale - and operational experience from McKinsey and C-suite roles at Swiss aerospace and defense company RUAG. That background informs Arena’s approach to reimagining electromagnetic simulation across semiconductors, aerospace, and automotive sectors.

The conversation covers how Arena is building what they call Artificial Intuition for EM design, the limitations of current simulation approaches, and why a foundation model purpose-built for electromagnetism represents a fundamentally different path forward.

Watch the full presentation:

Full archive at cdfam.com/barcelona-2026/

Pablo Hermoso Moreno, Senior Solutions Architect at NVIDIA, joins CDFAM Barcelona 2026 to discuss how AI is reshaping Computer-Aided Engineering workflows.

Pablo draws on his background in aerospace engineering, aerodynamics at Mercedes F1, and cloud-scale AI at AWS to frame where CAE bottlenecks actually live - and what NVIDIA is doing about them. The conversation covers AI physics and surrogate models for real-time simulation feedback, the role of digital twins, and how agentic AI built on the NVIDIA NeMo stack is automating end-to-end engineering workflows.

He also walks through the AI-Q Blueprint, a production-ready enterprise research agent, and explains how the NeMo Agent Toolkit manages LLM call prioritization to reduce latency without additional hardware investment.

Full presentation and archive at cdfam.com/barcelona-2026/

The next CDFAM Computational Design Symposium takes place July 15-16, 2026 in Washington DC, and submissions are invited from industry, software developers, and academia.

Submit to Present

The event continues the CDFAM Computational Design Symposium format: in-person, technically focused, and structured around practical application of computational design, simulation, AI, and machine learning across engineering, architecture, and manufacturing.

The DC edition extends the program to include additional presentations and roundtable discussions aligned with U.S. government initiatives, with intended engagement between industry, academia, and public-sector stakeholders.

Why Present

CD/DC draws a technically advanced audience from industrial design, engineering, architecture software development, government, and research.

Presenters are expected to go beyond product positioning and engage with substance and evidence: methods, results, open problems, and lessons from deployment.

The format is designed for knowledge transfer and networking, not sales pitches.

Washington DC adds a specific dimension. The audience includes government agencies and national labs with active interest in how computational design, simulation, and AI-driven workflows are being deployed at scale.

These are people who understand the constraints you are working within, have likely encountered the same problems, and in many cases are positioned to collaborate, validate, or extend the work. That makes the conversation after the talk as valuable as the talk itself.

Washington DC adds a further dimension. The audience includes government agencies and national labs with active interest in how computational design, simulation, and AI-driven workflows are being deployed at scale. Presenting here is a direct line to stakeholders who influence procurement, funding, and policy at the program level.

If your work is technically rigorous, deployment-tested, or advancing the state of the field, participating at CDFAM in Washington DC may be the best opportunity to share and connect with others in your space.

Confirmed speakers are already in place from:

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Atomic Machines, Boston Dynamics, General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, DARPA, Istari Digital, nTop, Luminary, Arena Physica, Neural Concept, Intact Solutions, Compute Maritime, Cognitive Design, Lexset, C-Infinity, Vinci, 4D.ai, and SysGit.

Space is limited. The program is filling quickly.

Proposal submissions and early bird registration is now available at cdfam.com.

Submit to Present

CD/DC is part of the CDFAM Computational Design Symposium series. Upcoming events: Washington DC, July 2026 / Tokyo, October 2026.