Applied Research Engineer - Higharc

About Higharc

Higharc is a VC-backed startup transforming how new homes are designed and built. Our founding team has shipped products for Autodesk, Electronic Arts, Nike, and Apple. We've raised over $175M with support from top-tier venture capital firms and more than 18 strategic investors, including industry leaders in construction, building products manufacturing, and distribution.

The Role

Higharc is seeking a hands-on Applied Research Engineer to translate our spatial AI research into practical capabilities for homebuyers and builders. You will join our Platform R&D team, responsible for taking proven research models and integrating them into the product.

What You'll Do

Our team develops AI that understands homes, and our generative floor plan engine is now a core workflow within Higharc's product. You will own the applied aspects of this work. The research team will provide a defined problem and a metric, and you will be responsible for training and adapting models, building necessary pipelines, and shipping components that adhere to product latency and cost budgets.

You will operate within an existing architecture, leveraging established engines, schemas, and evaluation frameworks. Your primary goal will be to enhance their speed, reproducibility, and extensibility for future development.

Key Responsibilities:

• Build the component layer for our layout synthesis engine, including a documented API contract, a product-callable service, and an evaluation gate for every change.
• Automate model retraining into a one-command job, incorporating built-in benchmarks and easily readable results for the team.
• Manage latency and cost budgets for learned capabilities.
• Expand core research into new functionalities, such as multi-story plans and real-time editing.
• Collaborate with infrastructure engineers on MLOps and deployment, and mentor researchers and interns on engineering best practices.
• Communicate your work effectively through written weekly status updates, clear pull requests, and design notes for significant changes.

Who You Are

You thrive on seeing your models deployed and impacting users. You excel at tackling well-defined problems with clear metrics, and you're adept at improving existing codebases without unnecessary rewrites. User experience, particularly latency, is a priority for you, even over raw benchmarks. You approach evaluation with honesty, recognizing test set artifacts and preferring to report regressions transparently.

Given that many collaborators are remote and some part-time, strong written communication is essential. You can seamlessly navigate discussions across research, product, and infrastructure domains within the same week. Furthermore, you possess an intuitive understanding of building design, recognizing fundamental flaws like an improperly placed bedroom door before any metric indicates it.

Qualifications

Required:

• 5+ years of professional software development experience, including at least 2 years training and shipping ML models to real users.
• End-to-end experience with at least one ML model, covering data preparation, training, evaluation, serving, and user integration.
• Fluency in Python and PyTorch (TensorFlow or Keras experience is acceptable if you are willing to transition to PyTorch).
• Experience with geometric or structured data, such as floor plans, CAD or BIM, graphs, or 2D/3D geometry.
• Proven ability to build or maintain an evaluation harness or benchmark and use it to gate changes.
• Experience packaging a model behind an API (e.g., FastAPI) and managing its latency and cost.
• A Master's degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field, or equivalent demonstrated work experience (a PhD is not required).
• Comfort working remotely with a team primarily operating on US Eastern hours.

Bonus Points:

• A background in architecture or building (degree, professional practice, or AEC software experience).
• Experience with constraint solvers (e.g., OR-Tools CP-SAT), general optimization, or generative models for layouts and floor plans.
• Plugin or tooling development in Rhino, Grasshopper, or Revit.
• Experience with Hugging Face, experiment tracking, or cloud model serving on AWS or Modal.
• Any relevant publications or open-source contributions.

Working at Higharc

Remote Work and Travel: Higharc has been an entirely remote company since its founding in 2018, offering flexibility and work-life balance. We prioritize both in-person collaboration and asynchronous deep-work. We schedule regular team meet-ups in our US hubs, and hiring may be prioritized in those hubs depending on the role. Any roles requiring frequent travel beyond these scheduled meet-ups will be clearly communicated early in the interview process.

Compensation and Benefits: We offer competitive salaries with significant equity in a fast-growing, well-funded company. For all full-time, U.S.-based employees, we provide:

• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage
• Flexible Paid Time Off (PTO)
• Meaningful maternity/paternity leave
• 401K
• Stipend for creating an ideal home office
• Support for ongoing learning and development

Please note: Higharc is aware of fraudulent recruiting activity. All legitimate communication will come from an an @higharc.com email address.