CAD/CAM Programmer

Foundational Industries, San Francisco Bay Area

What you will do

[6 months] You have mapped the highest-value CAM programming workflows and translated them into a prioritized automation roadmap, signed off by engineering and manufacturing leadership.
[6 months] You have shipped at least one working prototype automation — toolpath generation, feature recognition, or post-processing — using a CAM software API, validated against real part geometries.
[6 months] You have defined what "production-ready automated output" means for Foundational: the criteria, test cases, and acceptance benchmarks the software team builds and runs against.
[12 months] You lead a cross-functional team of CAM programmers, machinists, and software engineers delivering the CAM automation roadmap on schedule.

What you need

At Foundational, we build with people who want to own something. Work that matters, in an environment where what you ship is what counts.

Take ownership before they are asked. They see the gap and close it.
Operate with a high degree of judgment. We move fast, and good judgment travels farther than a playbook.
Communicate directly – concise, clear, and candid, especially when stakes are high.
Hold a high bar for themselves first, then for everyone around them.
Are genuinely energized by hard problems in physical, real-world environments. Energized — not just interested.
Stay effective when things are ambiguous, changing, or under pressure. That is the job.
Care more about outcomes than status. No ego, no politics, no rigid thinking.
Feel some personal connection to the mission. Reindustrializing America is not a tagline here — it is the work.
Are resilient and willing to change direction. We will pivot. The job is solving the problem, not defending the plan.

This is a place for people who want to build something that has never existed before and leave a clear mark on it.

You have 3+ years programming parts in Mastercam, Fusion 360, Siemens NX CAM, hyperMILL, or a comparable package — on real production jobs, not tutorials.
You know 3-axis, 4-axis, and 5-axis milling, turning, and mill-turn toolpath strategies from the inside: where the defaults fail and why.
You can spec fixturing, select tooling, and set feeds and speeds without looking them up.
You can take a manual CAM workflow you run every day, break it into discrete steps, and write down exactly what a machine would need to do each one autonomously.
You can write a product requirement that a software engineer can act on — specific, scoped, and unambiguous.
You communicate clearly at the boundary between the shop floor and a software team: translating machining constraints into engineering requirements and back.

You have scripted or automated something in a CAM environment — an API call, a macro, a template system — even if it was scrappy.
You have defined product requirements, written specs, and shipped features alongside software engineers.

These are the behavioral patterns that predict success here, in practice, under pressure.

Bias for action – You ship. You iterate. You move toward the hard thing.
Builder mentality – You have operated as a function of one. You are energized by building systems from scratch, and comfortable being the person who figures it out before asking for help.
High standards – You raise the bar rather than match it, and hold yourself to it first.
Systems thinking – You see the whole, not just your piece. You ask how your work connects to what comes before and after it.
Clarity of communication – Direct and concise, especially when it counts.
Collaborative judgment – You read the room, pick your moments, and move people without politics.