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