Computer-aided engineering (CAE) applications support the digital transformation of the manufacturing industry. They facilitate virtual product development and product testing via computer simulations. CAE applications generate vast quantities of heterogeneous data. Domain experts struggle to access and analyze them, because such engineering data are not sufficiently described with metadata. In this paper, we characterize the CAE domain and identify unsolved challenges for a tailored data and metadata management. For instance, work activities in product development projects and their relationships to data are not represented explicitly in current metadata models and existing data management solutions. We propose a metadata model that addresses all challenges and provides a connected view on all CAE data, metadata, and work activities of development projects in an interconnected structure. We evaluate the feasibility of our metadata model through a prototypical implementation and its application to a real-world use case. This verifies that our metadata model addresses the CAE-specific challenges and this way eases the task of domain experts to exploit relevant data.