Help reinvent how housing gets designed, permitted, and built in America.

Cedar is building the operating system for urban housing delivery. We combine architectural expertise with software, automation, and data systems to dramatically accelerate how projects move from land acquisition to approved designs and construction. The result: faster timelines, higher quality, lower risk, and more housing in the cities that need it most. Our team blends architects, engineers, and product builders. We design beautiful, responsive housing — and we build the software systems that make great architecture scalable.

The Role

We're hiring a Software Engineer to own the geometric core of our platform: the systems that represent, generate, and edit buildings in software. You'll work across the stack from computational geometry — parametric building generation, spatial data structures, solvers — to the interactive CAD tooling architects use to draw, edit, and refine designs in the browser. This is a deep IC role, not a management track. You'll work directly with our architects and product team, and the geometry and tooling you ship will sit at the center of everything Cedar delivers.

What you'll do

• Design and build the geometry engine behind automated housing design — parametric generation, constraint solving, and spatial reasoning

• Build fast, precise, web-based drawing and editing tools that professional architects rely on daily

• Own performance and correctness in the hardest parts of the codebase: geometry kernels, rendering pipelines, and editor interaction models

• Translate architectural logic — zoning envelopes, unit layouts, building code constraints — into robust computational systems

• Shape the technical architecture of the geometry and tooling stack as the product and team grow

What we're looking for

• 5+ years of engineering experience, with significant time spent building geometry-heavy or graphics-heavy software

• Deep expertise in computational geometry and interactive editing tools — you've built CAD tools, drawing editors, or parametric design systems, not just used them

• Strong command of web graphics (WebGL, WebGPU, Three.js, or similar) and the performance engineering that makes browser-based CAD feel native

• Background at a high-performance, web-based design platform — ideally somewhere like Higharc, Arcol, Rayon, or Figma, or an adjacent company such as Shapr3D, Onshape, Forma, Snaptrude, or Hypar

• Comfort with the ambiguity, pace, and breadth of an early-stage environment

• Bonus: familiarity with architectural design, BIM, or real estate development workflows

Logistics

• Based in our San Diego office, on-site / hybrid

• Reports to the Director of Engineering

• Senior-level cash compensation and meaningful equity

• Healthcare, dental, and vision