Join Formlabs if you want to bring ground-breaking professional 3D printers to the desktop of every designer, engineer, researcher, and artist in the world.
Maximilian King, Software Engineering Lead, shares everything you need to know about their Engineering team!
In this Video
Max discusses:
- Who is Formlabs?
- Details on the Formlabs Engineering team
- Interesting Projects & Unique Challenges
- The tech stack
- The interview process
- Why now is a good time to join
Video Summary
Here is the cleaned-up, highly readable version of the transcript with all the timestamps removed and the formatting improved for easy scanning.
Introduction My name is Max King. I’m the R&D software lead here at Formlabs.
Who is Formlabs?
Formlabs is the leader in making accessible, high-performance 3D printing technology, helping customers bring their ideas to life. We serve engineers, product designers, manufacturers, and healthcare professionals globally—including companies like Google, Tesla, New Balance, and NASA.
This means we build physical devices like printers and post-processors, develop our own materials for those products, and build the software that ties it all together to get a model from your screen to a printed part in your hand.
Details on the Formlabs Engineering Team
The team has about 50 dedicated software engineers across a number of functions, but overall, Formlabs has probably 150 people who commit code daily. This is broken across several groups:
- Embedded teams: Work on the firmware that drives the printers, takes instructions, and operates motor moves.
- Desktop software teams: Focus on how to prepare your model for print and send it to the hardware.
- Cloud product teams: Run cloud-native applications for managing printer fleets and reviewing print history.
- DevOps and QA teams: Accelerate the other engineering teams.
- API and Automation team: A newly formed team focused on software architecture and API design for both internal use and external customers.
Interesting Projects & Unique Challenges
Software is critical at Formlabs for a successful print. It makes our printers fast and reliable, and it ensures parts are highly accurate with a great surface finish—the metrics our customers actually care about. Because Formlabs owns the hardware, the material, and the software, very little of what we build is in a vacuum.
A Recent Example: We recently tried to improve our support generation algorithms to give existing customers better prints via a simple software update. To print a part well, you must hold it in place during the process using supports, but those supports must also be easily removable without damaging the part. Improving part quality just by changing how we generate supports isn’t as easy as picking different locations. The intersection between materials, printers, and algorithms is incredibly tight. Some materials are sturdy, while others are elastic, requiring entirely different support structures.
Because this process is inherently non-deterministic (we’re dealing with physical world problems), we have to build functional software and then actually print the parts to validate that the result is better. That feedback loop is incredibly rare for a software company.
Community & Culture: We have a passionate, community-driven user base with constant feature requests. The challenge is focusing on the right problems. To do this, we’ve embraced a “demo or die” culture: build quickly and iteratively. Instead of writing 10-page documents and creating a bunch of mockups, we get working code to feel the experience and print parts immediately. This direct, unfettered access to users keeps us focused on real customer pain points—something you rarely see in classic SaaS or B2B.
The Tech Stack
Our technology stack varies by team:
- Desktop Teams: Primarily a C++ shop using QT and QML for the front end to ensure cross-platform compatibility (Windows, Mac, Linux). C++ is essential for our performance-sensitive algorithms. We also dabble in Python, Go, and a bit of Rust for prototypes.
- Embedded Teams: Largely C++, but dealing with lower-level tasks like custom Linux builds for hardware. We are expanding into IoT technologies like pub/sub network protocols for low-latency, low-power devices.
- Cloud and Web Teams: A healthy balance of Django and React, deployed on both AWS and Google Cloud. We use classic tools like relational databases, log stores, and monitoring platforms like Grafana.
The Interview Process
Our interview process is fairly conventional but with a few unique twists:
- Recruiter Screen: We discuss what we’re building and solving. Uniquely, everyone at Formlabs is technical—even our recruiters deeply understand the product.
- Take-Home Project / HackerRank: We provide realistic day-to-day problems rather than asking you to write a binary search tree (AI like Gemini or Claude can do that better anyway). We want to probe your actual technical competency.
- Technical Loop (On-site or Virtual): You’ll meet with the team and cross-functional partners to test architectural thinking, culture alignment, and problem-solving skills.
- CEO Meet-and-Greet: To maintain our startup spirit and fight becoming a big, slow company, every incoming engineer meets with our CEO (who also happens to be named Max). That level of leadership engagement is very rare for an organization of our size.
Why Now is a Good Time to Join
You should be excited to work at Formlabs if you want to have a direct impact on a global product used to build real things. When we ship a firmware update or a new slicing feature, we literally change how products are made by tens of thousands of users every day.
We don’t operate like a traditional software company where product dictates features, design draws pixels, and engineering blindly implements. Engineers are expected to contribute to the idea pool. We operate as a meritocracy where the best idea wins.
The opportunity for personal and professional growth is off the charts. A small demo you build could become a beta feature and snowball into a major aspect of the software ecosystem. If you want to be surrounded by world-class engineers across hardware, electrical, materials, and software in a highly collaborative environment, this is the place for you.
