CAM Integration and Partner Engineer in Sheffield

Digital CNC is a University of Sheffield AMRC spinout building a deterministic, physics-based machining prediction engine delivered natively inside the CAM systems machinists already use, including Siemens NX, CATIA V5 and Mastercam.

Built on approximately 25 years of AMRC machining research, our technology lets CAM programmers see how a machine tool will actually behave before a single chip is cut, producing toolpaths that are machine-specific and optimised at the point of design.

We sell directly to aerospace and defence OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers, and we are building OEM partnerships that will embed our engine inside established digital machining products.

This role sits at the centre of both.

The role

This is a dual‑mandate engineering role.

You will own the integration layer that connects our prediction engine to the CAM systems our customers use, and you will own the engineering side of our OEM partnerships, where established software vendors embed our engine inside their own products.

These are two faces of the same technical problem: presenting a physics engine to a host application through a clean, stable, well‑documented boundary.

In our own plugins, you control both sides of that boundary.

In a partner integration, engineers at another company build against it, which raises the bar on interface design, versioning, documentation and support.

You will work closely with the VP Engineering on the component architecture and with our R&D engineers day to day, testing what is feasible in the engine and shaping how its capability is exposed.

You will also work closely with our field engineer, who uses the software intensively at customer sites and acts as your in‑house end user, so that what ships reflects how CAM programmers actually work.

User experience is paramount in this role.

Our promise to customers is machining physics without the complexity: no specialist controller training, results in around five clicks, inside the CAM environment they already know.

Every integration decision you make either protects that simplicity or erodes it.

The hardest part of this job is not connecting the engine to a host application, it is doing so in a way that a busy CAM programmer finds obvious.

As partnerships mature, you will be the named technical contact our partners rely on.

This role suits an engineer who enjoys the boundary between deep domain software and the people who consume it: someone who takes pride in an API another engineer can pick up in a morning, and an interface a CAM programmer never has to think about.

What you will do

• Design, build and maintain Digital CNC's native integrations for Siemens NX, CATIA V5 and Mastercam, covering toolpath extraction, machine and controller context, and the presentation of prediction results inside the CAM environment
• Own the end‑user experience of the integrated product: workflows measured in clicks, results presented where the CAM programmer already looks, and complexity kept inside the engine rather than pushed onto the user
• Work with the R&D team to establish what is feasible in the engine and translate that capability into simple, dependable user‑facing workflows
• Iterate with the field engineer as a demanding in‑house end user, using feedback from customer trials to simplify relentlessly
• Own the plugin release process across host CAM versions, managing the compatibility matrix as CAM vendors update their own APIs
• Work with the field engineer and customers during Proof of Value trials to resolve integration issues quickly and feed improvements back into the plugin architecture
• Own the engine's external integration boundary: a versioned, documented API/SDK that partner engineers build against, designed with the VP Engineering and CTO
• Produce and maintain partner‑facing technical material: SDK reference documentation, integration guides, worked sample code and a partner sandbox with evaluation licences and benchmark cases
• Act as the named technical contact for partner engineering teams during evaluation, integration and post‑launch support, working to defined response targets
• Run the technical side of partner onboarding, including integration workshops and joint debugging sessions
• Maintain the regression suite covering partner‑consumed interfaces, so every release ships with evidence that the boundary still holds
• Architecture and engineering practice
• Contribute to the separation of engine and integration layers so the engine remains a cleanly embeddable component
• Help establish and uphold release engineering practice: semantic versioning, backwards compatibility policy, deprecation notices and release notes suitable for external consumption
• Follow the company's information handling protocols in all partner communications, given the commercially sensitive relationships in our ecosystem
• What we are looking for
• Strong software engineering background in C++ and/or C# in a commercial product environment
• Experience developing against at least one major CAM, CAD or PLM platform API, such as "NX Open", CAA/CATIA automation, the Mastercam API (NET‑Hook/C‑Hook) or comparable
• Experience designing, documenting or maintaining APIs or SDKs consumed by engineers outside your own team
• Understanding of CAM fundamentals: toolpath structures, post‑processing, and how CAM output relates to what a machine tool actually executes
• Demonstrable care for end‑user experience in technical software: evidence of simplifying workflows, reducing steps or hiding complexity for non‑specialist users
• Disciplined engineering habits: version control, automated testing, code review and an instinct for backwards compatibility
• A willingness to embrace AI tools and emerging technologies to improve efficiency, support day‑to‑day work, and enhance the quality of outcomes
• Clear written and verbal communication, comfortable working directly with external engineering teams
• Right to work in the UK
• Experience integrating or embedding third‑party engines, kernels or components into a host application, on either side of that relationship
• Familiarity with machining simulation, verification or optimisation software
• Exposure to NC program structure and controller behaviour, including how header, tolerance and smoothing settings affect execution
• Experience in aerospace, defence or another regulated engineering software environment
• Experience with release engineering at an ISV: CI/CD, installer and licensing technologies, SBOM and dependency management
• Experience using agentic software development practices.

What we offer

• Competitive salary, dependent on experience
• Share options in a venture‑backed spin‑out at seed stage
• Genuine architectural ownership: the integration boundary you design becomes the foundation of both our product and our partner channel
• A small, senior team including a VP Engineering with three decades in enterprise software, a CTO co‑inventor of the core technology, and direct access to the founders
• Significant career growth potential as the business scales, with the opportunity to shape your role, broaden your responsibilities, and grow with the company
• Sheffield base at the heart of the UK's advanced manufacturing cluster

Digital CNC is an equal opportunities employer and welcomes applications from all backgrounds.

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