CEO & Co-Founder, Engen

About Montauk Capital

Montauk Capital is an investment management platform that spans venture investing and venture studio efforts that builds and invests in capital in category leading companies. We focus on backing tech companies in the ‘Electron Economy,’ the massive shift toward software-enabled industrial and energy systems. This generational transition is reshaping how we power intelligence, move people and goods, and build resilient industries. From AI, data centers and Web3 to industrial robotics and re-shoring supply chains, the future of growth is built on electrification and the intelligent use of energy.

About Stealth AI Company, “Engen”

Born out of Montauk’s venture studio, Engen is reimagining mechanical engineering productivity. Today, engineers spend nearly half their time performing repetitive CAD manipulation instead of true design. Existing AI assistants are generic and disconnected from the underlying design tools. Engen’s mission is to build a vertically integrated "System of Action" for mechanical engineers: an intelligent agent embedded within CAD environments that automates cross-tool workflows and progressively learns domain-specific logic.

The immediate focus is to build an agentic platform that automates geometry updates and feature-tree edits across mainstream CAD systems, targeting high-velocity industrial verticals to drive fast iteration and defensible data capture. Long-term, Engen will evolve into the foundation for an “autonomous mechanical engineer” — orchestrating the full design-to-manufacture loop so human experts can focus entirely on creative innovation.

Key Responsibilities

• Strategic Vision & Category Creation: Define and evangelize the vision of Engen as the vertical-specific "System of Action", building and then moving beyond simple text-to-CAD tools to build an "autonomous mechanical engineer" that orchestrates the entire design-to-manufacture loop.
• Commercial Execution & Pilot Acquisition: Lead the "Business Development-led" technical roadmap by securing strategic "toehold" pilots in high-velocity, mid-consequence verticals (e.g., industrial automation, robotics). Focus on securing partners willing to grant access to proprietary datasets in exchange for custom solutions.
• Data Strategy & Defensibility: Negotiate complex data-licensing agreements to solve the "Proprietary Data Hostage" problem, ensuring Engen acquires the fine-tuning data necessary to build a durable moat against generic incumbent models.
• Product Roadmap Orchestration: Guide the evolution from "Phase 1: The Wedge" (a CAD plug-in for immediate workflow automation) to "Phase 2: The Moat" (a cross-application agentic fabric), balancing immediate utility with long-term autonomy.
• Team Building: Recruit a high-caliber technical co-founder and founding team with rare cross-disciplinary expertise in geometric kernels (Parasolid, ACIS), agentic AI, and mechanical engineering workflows.
• Fundraising & Stakeholder Management: Drive external funding processes by articulating the technical value proposition to investors, validating the differentiation against frontier models, and managing board relationships.

Key Attributes

• 5-10 years of leadership experience, preferably within industrial SaaS, CAD/CAM software, or AI-driven workflow automation.
• Proven commercial track record in technical software for industrial sectors (EPC, manufacturing, automotive), with an understanding of ways to navigate long sales cycles and adoption risk.
• Domain Depth (CAD/PLM): Deep understanding of the engineering software landscape, including the friction between "System of Record" (PLM) and CAD softwares, and the technical constraints of geometric kernels.
• Agentic AI Strategy: Ability to conceptualize and deploy agentic workflows that operate as a "peer" to the engineer, utilizing technologies like the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to stitch together fragmented toolchains coupled with our own proprietary fine-tuned large language models.
• Demonstrated ability to monetize data strategies, specifically transforming pilot data access into a defensible, proprietary global model.
• Operational Agility: Capability to iterate quickly in "mid-consequence" markets (e.g., consumer hardware tooling) to validate technology before scaling to high-liability sectors like aerospace.
• Technical Fluency: Sufficient technical grasp to partner effectively with a kernel-expert CTO and define product requirements for complex constraint solvers and feature-tree logic.
• Experience scaling early-stage ventures, specifically in navigating the "0 to 1" phase of finding product-market fit and securing initial enterprise partners.

Key skills/competency

• Strategic Vision
• Commercial Execution
• Data Strategy
• Product Management
• Team Building
• Fundraising
• Industrial SaaS
• CAD/CAM Software
• Agentic AI
• Geometric Kernels