AI Design Engineer

AI DESIGN ENGINEER

Custom Millwork, Casework & Fixtures

Location: Tacoma, WA · Full-Time · On-Site

Travel: Some travel to El Paso, TX and Phoenix, AZ

Reports to: Director of AI & Automation and Director of Operations

Industry: Commercial Construction & Manufacturing

Compensation: $105,000 – $165,000 plus bonus

It's 11:40 on a Tuesday night, and you're doing it again.

The house is quiet. You've got an AI model open on one monitor and a reception desk elevation on the other. You're trying to get the model to read an architect's PDF, find the casework, and give you a cabinet schedule your engineering software can actually use. It half-works. You're grinning anyway.

At 7:00 tomorrow morning you'll walk into a drafting room where that same architect's PDF gets redrawn by hand, line by line. The submittal goes out, comes back covered in redlines, goes out again, comes back again. Someone re-keys dimensions that already exist in three other files. The most experienced engineer in the building carries the shop's construction standards in their head, and nobody has written them down because nobody has the time.

You mentioned AI in a meeting once. Someone called it "your computer thing," and the room moved on.

You're not crazy. You're early. We've been looking for you.

This Industry Still Draws Like It's 1998.

Here it is plainly. Custom millwork, cabinetry, and commercial construction have worked the same way for a long time.

Drafting is still manual. Design intent arrives as a PDF and a skilled person redraws it. A single wall-paneling submittal has to show every joint condition, the panel core, veneer species and cut, leaf and panel matching, room-match sequencing, grain direction, blocking heights, and the hardware schedule. Every line is drawn by a human, and when the architect changes one dimension, a human redraws all of it.

Engineering is still translation. Product libraries help. But every custom reception desk, feature wall, art display, and curved transaction top still starts with a person converting someone else's drawing into parts, joinery, and machining.

Manufacturing is still manual everywhere except the robots. The CNC router is the future. The tape measure, the paper traveler, and the re-keyed cut list are not.

That isn't where this industry is going. Frontier doesn't intend to wait for a software vendor to deliver the future in a version 14.0 update.

We Don't Want Someone to Use Better Software. We Want Someone to Change the Industry.

This is not a CAD manager job. We're not looking for someone to maintain our libraries, run our upgrade cycle, or train people on new buttons.

We want the person who is going to work out what engineering, drafting, and design look like when AI is part of the crew, prove it on real projects that get built on our floor and installed in real buildings, and then watch the rest of the industry try to catch up.

That's the job: you, Frontier, and the tip of the spear.

Ownership Is Making a Bet. The Bet Is You.

Most manufacturers our size put their big money into equipment: a new CNC router, a panel saw, an edgebander line, a robot cell. We buy machines too. We're manufacturers, and we love machines.

But Frontier's ownership believes the bigger opportunity is this one. Changing how we engineer, draft, and design is a bigger lever than the next large piece of capital equipment. That isn't a line in a slide deck. It's how ownership thinks about where money goes.

Frontier is an aggressively AI-forward company with AI-forward ownership. Our leadership doesn't just "support" AI. They use it, they understand it, and they fund it the way manufacturers fund equipment. We've already hired a Director of AI & Automation to drive AI across the business. This role takes that same commitment to the core of what we make: the drawings, the engineering, and the design behind every piece of millwork that leaves our shop. You will work for that Director, alongside the leadership of our cabinet engineering and drafting team.

Efficiency That Grows the Shop

The point of making drafting and engineering faster is not to shrink the team. It is to take the capacity we free up and put it into more work, more complex projects, and more people growing into this craft in a technological world.

Every hour we pull out of redraw, re-keying, and tribal-knowledge bottlenecks is an hour we can put into taking on more volume, training the next generation of engineers and drafters, and opening roles that did not exist when every line had to be drawn by hand. Frontier intends to grow and expand the operation. AI is how we create the room to do that without burning out the people who already carry the standards in their heads.

This role amplifies craftspeople. It does not replace them. The efficiency pickups fund growth, new opportunities, and a bigger shop that can compete on both craft and technology.

Signs This Is You

•    You have a folder somewhere named "someday" or "experiments," and it's full of scripts.

•    You've exported an engineering report to Excel and wondered why a person still has to read it.

•    You know why the accessible section of a reception transaction counter can't sit at 42 inches, and you've had to explain it to a designer more than once.

•    You know what a blueprint-matched veneer panel set is, and you know what one wrong flitch does to a schedule.

•    You've built a Microvellum or Cabinet Vision library, a SolidWorks configuration, a Grasshopper definition, an AutoLISP routine, or a Python script that your company still relies on and doesn't really understand.

•    You've read the release notes for a new AI model the night it came out.

•    You've watched a 30-year veteran retire and take a career's worth of construction knowledge with them, and it bothered you more than it bothered anyone else.

•    You love the craft. Sawdust doesn't bother you. You'd rather stand at the router with the operator than sit in a conference room talking about "digital transformation."

If you read that list and felt seen, keep going.

Where You Are Now vs. Frontier

WHERE YOU ARE NOW 

•  AI is the thing you do on weekends

•  Your idea needs a business case before it can get a business case

•  The drafting process stays the way it is because it has always been that way

•  Leadership asks whether ChatGPT is "safe"

•  You're "the one who tried that AI thing once"   

AT FRONTIER

 •  AI is the job, on the clock, with a budget

•  Ownership uses the tools and funds them like equipment

•  The drafting process is the first thing on the table

•  Leadership asks how fast you can show it working

•  You're the person helping change how an industry draws, and helping the company grow because of it

Why Not Just Go Work for a Software Company?

You could. You could join a CAD vendor and build features for shops you'll never set foot in, ship them in an annual release, and read about the results in a support ticket.

Or you can do it here. A drawing you change on Monday gets cut on our routers that week and installed in a lobby the week after. You can walk the floor, watch your work in the hands of the people building it, and fix it before lunch. Every product category we make is your test bench: reception desks, wall paneling, countertops, casework, displays. Nobody has to be convinced to pilot it. The pilot is our next job.

What You'll Actually Do

You will own the future of how Frontier goes from an architect's design intent to cut parts on a cart. You'll embed with our engineering and drafting teams, learn exactly how the work flows today, and then rebuild it with AI in the loop. You'll do it alongside the people who do the work, not over their heads. You report to the Director of AI & Automation and the Director of Operations, and you work day to day with cabinet engineering and drafting leadership.

Your First 90 Days

•    Draw with the team. Sit with our drafters and engineers. Learn our standards, our libraries, and the full path from bid set to CNC.

•    Map one product family end to end. Pick reception desks, wall paneling, countertops, or casework, and find out where the hours go and where the errors start.

•    Kill one painful, repetitive task. Ship an AI-assisted workflow on a live project and measure it honestly against the old way.

•    Come back with a 12-month plan for what Frontier's engineering department looks like a year from now, including how efficiency gains turn into growth capacity.

Ongoing

•    Build AI-assisted workflows for drawing intake, spec and bid-set reading, submittal and shop-drawing generation, redline response, and QA checks against AWI standards and project specs.

•    Turn tribal knowledge into rules, parametric libraries, and data that both people and models can use.

•    Close the gap between engineering and the machine: automated BOMs, cut lists, nesting, and CNC handoff with fewer touches and zero re-keying.

•    Speed up design: concept options, renderings, and early engineering for custom fixtures in hours instead of weeks.

•    Test the tools hard. Vendors are rushing to add "AI" to their products. Buy when it's real, build when our data is the advantage, and walk away when it's a demo.

•    Work with our Director of AI & Automation and our estimating team so design data flows forward into production and backward into bids.

•    Bring our drafters and engineers along with you. Make them faster and sharper. Use the capacity you create so Frontier can take on more work, expand the operation, and keep creating opportunities for people who want to grow in this craft as the tools change.

Who You Are

We care far more about what you've built than where you went to school. But this is a bullseye search, so here's the target.

Must-Haves

•    Real craft credibility. Years inside custom millwork, architectural woodwork, commercial casework, or store fixtures, as a drafter, design engineer, engineering manager, CNC programmer, or project engineer. You've drawn it, built it, or fixed it in the field. Our shop foremen will check, and you'll pass.

•    You've built with AI on your own. Not "explored." Built. Scripts, agents, automations, a hacked-together tool that made your own job faster. Show us.

•    Fluency in at least one of the core platforms (see the fine print below). You know how a design-to-manufacturing system thinks.

•    You read architectural drawings and specs fluently, including AWI standards and the casework and countertop sections of a project manual.

•    A builder's bias. A working prototype beats a forty-page plan every time.

•    You teach. Our people will see you as an ally, not a threat. That's how adoption happens, and how growth sticks.

Strong Pluses

•    Library development or administration in Microvellum or Cabinet Vision

•    Scripting in Python, AutoLISP, C#/.NET, the SolidWorks API, or Grasshopper

•    Hands-on work with LLM APIs, agents, document AI, or computer vision

•    Revit and BIM coordination on large commercial projects

•    Countertop templating and fabrication, or CNC router and stone programming

•    Lean or process-improvement experience

•    You already post, write, or speak publicly about where this industry is headed

What You're Walking Into

We'll be upfront about this. Frontier's engineering and drafting teams are skilled, experienced, and proud of their work. They also work the way nearly every good shop in this industry works: mature tools, a lot of manual redraw, and a lot of hard-won knowledge that lives in people's heads instead of in a system.

There is no AI playbook for engineering and drafting in custom millwork. Not here, not at our competitors, not at the software vendors. Nobody has written it.

That's the job.

If you need clean, structured data and a defined process before you can do anything, this isn't the role. If you look at a stack of redlined PDFs and see the next ten years of your career, we should talk.

What you will have is something almost nobody in this industry gets: ownership that understands what you're trying to do, funds it like equipment, and will clear obstacles out of your way. And a clear mandate: the wins you create are meant to help us grow, not just do the same work with fewer people.

About Frontier Door & Cabinet

We are builders. True American manufacturers. Frontier Door & Cabinet has been in business for nearly 30 years. We started as a garage operation and grew into one of the largest specialty contractors in the Pacific Northwest, focused on Division 08 (doors, frames, and hardware) and Division 12 (cabinets and countertops) for commercial construction, with operations in Tacoma, El Paso, and Phoenix. Our facilities run CNC routers, panel saws, and edgebanders, and our estimating team quotes nearly every available project in our markets.

Cabinets get installed. Projects have deadlines, budgets, and general contractors who don't care about your technology roadmap. They care that the casework matched the submittal and showed up on time. That pressure is exactly why AI matters so much here. The gap between where this industry is and where it could be is enormous, and we intend to be the company that closes it first, and to use that advantage to expand what we can take on.

What We Offer

•    Competitive salary ($105,000 – $165,000 depending on experience) plus bonus

•    Health, dental, and vision insurance

•    401(k)

•    A real budget for AI tools, hardware, training, and industry events (IWF, AWFS, AWI), funded the way we fund production equipment

•    Direct access to ownership and the leadership team, without layers in between

•    The chance to build something the whole industry ends up copying, and to help grow a real manufacturing operation while you do it

How to Apply

Send your resume and answers to two questions. No cover letter.

1.    Show us the most interesting thing you've built with AI on your own time. A repo, a screen recording, a screenshot, or a photo of the whiteboard all work. We want proof that you build things.

2.    Name the first drafting or engineering task you'd eliminate, and tell us how you'd do it.

If you've spent years thinking "this could all be so much better" while the rest of the shop kept doing it the old way, this is your chance to stop thinking it and start building it.

The Fine Print: The Software

Software isn't the point of this job. But you should know we speak the language, and that you'll be walking into a familiar world.

The people we want have lived inside some combination of these:

•    Microvellum on AutoCAD / BricsCAD: parametric casework engineering, shop drawings, CNC output

•    Cabinet Vision: design-to-manufacture for cabinets and casework

•    AlphaCAM: CNC router and stone programming, nesting

•    SolidWorks (and SWOOD): complex fixtures and mixed wood, metal, and glass assemblies

•    AutoCAD, Revit, Rhino + Grasshopper, Inventor

•    Bluebeam Revu: submittals, redlines, and revision tracking

Also familiar: TopSolid'Wood, imos iX, 2020 / Design Flex, Moraware CounterGo, SlabSmith, digital templating (Prodim, LPI)

On the AI side: whatever is best this month. Python, LLM APIs, agents, AutoLISP, .NET, the SolidWorks API.

You don't need all of them. You need to know why each one still takes so many clicks and have a theory about how few it should take.

Frontier Door & Cabinet, Inc. is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or veteran status.