Simbolic

Overview

Simbolic was a venture exploring the workflow side of engineering simulation: the practical reality that serious simulation work is rarely “one tool, one model.” It’s a chain of tools, manual handoffs, and fragile glue scripts. We were building the infrastructure layer to orchestrate those chains and make them reproducible.

What I worked on

• Cross-tool orchestration. A runtime that could drive different simulation tools through a shared interface, so a workflow author could describe what needed to happen without hard-coding the how against any one tool’s quirks.
• Standardized interfaces. Designing the contract between the orchestration layer and the underlying simulators: inputs, outputs, versioning, and the metadata you need to actually re-run something six months later and get the same result.
• Reproducibility. Treating simulation runs as artifacts: pinned inputs, captured environments, machine-readable outputs.

What I took away

A clean abstraction over a messy, heterogeneous toolchain is mostly a social problem disguised as a technical one. Every tool’s idea of “the right way” is load-bearing for some user. The work that pays off is the work that meets each tool where it actually lives.