At 1872 AI, we are transforming industrial manufacturing in the United States by building AI-native factories capable of lights-out production—from CAD to finished part with minimal human input. Our initial focus targets the energy and infrastructure sectors—power generation, grid infrastructure, and compute facilities—where critical supply chain bottlenecks in steel fabrication are limiting growth.

About the Role

You will build the core software platform that powers our factories—the execution systems that coordinate automation, the interfaces operators use on the shop floor, and the portals customers use to place and track orders. You'll work full-stack, from backend services and workflow orchestration to frontend UIs and hardware integrations. You operate with extreme ownership—writing the code, deploying the infrastructure, and debugging the result on the factory floor. You will lean heavily on AI-assisted development to ship full-stack features faster than traditional teams.

Base Qualifications

• 5+ years building production software you owned end-to-end, from design through prod debugging. We'll consider fewer years for exceptional builders or equivalent hands-on experience.
• Proficiency in multiple programming languages with a proven track record of building and maintaining distributed systems. You know how to build scalable backends (Go or Python) and intuitive frontends (TypeScript or JavaScript).
• Solid grasp of SQL and data modeling, plus object stores (S3, GCS), caches, and message buses (MQTT, Kafka, Redis).
• Experience modeling long-running, failure-prone processes: job queues, durable execution, retries and idempotency, state machines that survive a restart or a network partition.
• You are pushing the frontier of AI-assisted development, not just using it. You build your own harnesses, skills, subagents, and evals, and your throughput is measurably higher because of it.
• Ability to self-direct and thrive in a fast-paced, ambiguous environment.

Preferred Qualifications

• Built software for a company that makes physical products, or software that shapes mechanical or electrical design: MES, ERP, PLM, CAD/CAM, or shop-floor systems. You know why BOMs, routings, and traceability are hard problems and not CRUD.
• Worked with 3D geometry in code. STEP, IGES, DXF, B-reps and meshes, CAD kernels (OpenCascade, Parasolid, ACIS), feature recognition, nesting, CAM and toolpath generation.
• Driven real equipment from software over OPC UA, EtherNet/IP, MQTT, or a vendor's proprietary API. You've written the adapter layer between a service and a machine that has its own state, timing, and failure modes.
• Written firmware or embedded software, and worked on robot controllers, PLCs, or motion control.
• Worked with machine vision. 2D inspection, 3D structured light, laser profilometry, photogrammetry, calibration and measurement uncertainty, or inference at the edge.
• Ingested, stored, and queried high-rate sensor data at scale.
• Comfortable with networking and operating systems: VLANs, firewall rules, routing, VPNs, and Linux.
• Familiar with Bazel or Buck2, including remote caching and remote execution.

Why Join

• You are an early employee in the software org. You define the tech stack and the culture.
• The role evolves as we do. Lots of room to grow into leadership, go deep technically, or help spin up new teams as we scale.
• You'll use the latest tools and work with a team that wants to continuously improve.
• We take risks and spend where it counts. The best idea wins.

Compensation & Benefits

• Competitive salary + significant early-stage equity.
• Unlimited PTO: We trust you to manage your time and take the breaks you need to stay productive and healthy.
• Paid parental leave: Support for new parents during this important life transition.
• We cover 100% of employee’s premiums and 80% of your family’s premiums through industry-leading medical, dental, and vision coverage to keep you and your family healthy.

This role is based on-site in Cincinnati, OH and is not open to remote work.

1872 AI is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. We are committed to building a diverse team and encourage candidates from all backgrounds to apply. To request a reasonable accommodation during the application process, please contact [email protected].

This position may be subject to a background check in accordance with applicable law. A criminal record will not automatically disqualify a candidate from consideration.