to deliver complex targeted operations. Here we investigate a scheme to engineer a target Hamiltonian for photonic cavities using ancilla qubits. By off-resonantly driving dispersively coupled ancilla qubits, we develop an optimized approach to engineering an arbitrary photon-number dependent (PND) Hamiltonian for the cavities while minimizing the operation errors. The engineered Hamiltonian admits various applications including canceling unwanted cavity self-Kerr interactions, creating higher-order nonlinearities for quantum simulations, and designing quantum gates resilient to noise. Our scheme can be implemented with coupled microwave cavities and transmon qubits in superconducting circuit systems.