Sr. AI Engineer, Labs

Higharc • Full-time • Remote (United States) • 3d ago

About Us

Higharc is a VC-backed startup that is changing how new homes are designed and built. Join a founding team who’ve shipped products for Autodesk, Electronic Arts, Nike, and Apple. We have raised a total of $83M with support from top-notch venture capital firms and more than 18 strategic investors—industry leaders in construction, building products manufacturing, and distribution.

We are hiring a Senior AI Engineer as a foundational member of Higharc Labs. This is a role for an entrepreneurial AI engineer who can move from problem definition to shipped software quickly, building agent workflows that are useful, reliable, and safe in production.

What You'll Do

You will work across product, design, ML, and engineering to identify the right bets, build production-safe prototypes, validate with users, and either hand off successful, product-ready betas or sunset with shared learnings. Expect to:

Own AI experiments end-to-end: shape hypotheses, define success criteria, build, ship, measure, and iterate
Partner with ML Engineering to productize ML prototypes and harden them for production, while leading graduation criteria across technical readiness and product readiness: contracts, failure modes, eval harnesses, user validation, reliability, controlled model updates, and cost controls
Design agent action schemas and tool contracts that make model behavior predictable under real-world variance
Build retrieval systems (RAG) for agent context: chunking/indexing strategies, vector search quality, and grounding behavior
Build orchestration systems for agent workflows: stateful sessions, streaming, async job coordination, and failure recovery
Build evaluation loops that combine deterministic validation, domain heuristics, and model-based review
Design human-in-the-loop flows for approvals, intervention, and safe execution of high-impact actions
Talk directly with users and internal stakeholders to refine problem framing and validate assumptions early

About You

You are excited to have unusual autonomy and greenfield scope in a company with real revenue and customers. You thrive in ambiguity, don't mind that some experiments get killed, and are energized by the challenge of building something new inside an established organization. If that sounds like a feature and not a bug, let's go!

You have:

7+ years experience shipping production software, including customer-facing AI/LLM features
Ownership of ambiguous, high-impact problems from concept through deployment and iteration
Experience building AI agent systems: tool use, context management, and orchestration loops
Experience designing and operating RAG systems, including vector DB-backed retrieval pipelines
Experience defining or operating evaluation systems for non-deterministic AI outputs
Strong backend systems skills, including stateful services and real-time/streaming workflows
Experience managing AI costs in production (model selection, context budgeting, caching, and usage controls)
Experience collaborating across research, ML platform, and product teams to move models into production
Product engineering instincts: you can simplify scope and prioritize what creates measurable value
Clear written and verbal communication in a remote, async environment

A major plus if you also bring:

Experience as a technical founder or early engineer at a high-growth SaaS company
ML depth: fine-tuning, rigorous model evaluation, and the ability to apply current ML/LLM research in product systems

While we've identified the core experience and skills required above, please still apply if you have more or different experience than this! We will use your previous experience and performance across the series of interviews to establish appropriate level within our organization in a fair and equitable way.

Working at Higharc

Higharc has been remote first since our founding in 2018. We offer flexible hours so you can do your best work without missing out on life. Higharc offers competitive salaries with significant equity, in a fast-growing, well-funded company.

Personal healthiness is an important value for us- we provide comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage, with unlimited PTO, and meaningful maternity/paternity leave to all U.S based employees that are full-time. You'll also have access to other big-company benefits such like short and long-term disability plans and a 401K. Haven't worked remotely before? We provide a stipend to create the ideal home office.