Factory Deployed Engineer

Nox Metals raised an $11.5M seed led by Hyperion, with Palmer Luckey, Y Combinator, and YC partner Jared Friedman, on top of a YC Summer 2025 batch, building AI-powered, vertically integrated metals factories to reindustrialize American manufacturing. Founded by Zane Hengsperger (University of Michigan grad, Forbes 30 Under 30, with a large manufacturing following on X), Nox has shipped metal to hundreds of American factories in its first ~7 months, serves ~90 customers from local job shops to SpaceX and Anduril, and is reviving a WW2-era 30,000-sq-ft Detroit factory.

The mission is loud and specific: build 100x more factories so America wins manufacturing. Nox is "Amazon Prime for cut-to-size metals", it sells blocks of aluminum (plus Inconel and stainless on request), cut to spec with next-day turnaround and instant online quoting in milliseconds, not days. Its software, Nox Nest, runs an ML bin-packing/nesting solver that finds the optimal cut path across thousands of plates and dozens of alloys, and turns offcuts into pre-positioned inventory.

Software, automation, and factory design replace the slow, manual quoting and cutting of legacy metal service centers. The team is small, in Detroit, and runs intense.

Not a software engineer in the traditional sense, but a Factory Deployed Engineer, a manufacturing engineer who gets things done through software, finding the global maximum of software and hardware to make the factory run. You own projects end to end. Because Nox's roadmap shifts fast as scale, funding, and demand climb, the job demands someone high-agency and smart enough to know which things matter and which don't, and to not get precious about the work itself, because the outcome is what matters.

The people who do this well have built systems and products that touch the physical world, real-world dependencies, manufacturing constraints, and understand that natively. That's why Nox is targeting people from Hadrian, SpaceX, Fictiv, Send Cut Send, and Proto Labs, and