[Hiring] Applied Research Engineer @Higharc

Role Description

Higharc is seeking a hands-on Applied Research Engineer to turn our spatial AI research into capabilities that homebuyers and builders use. You'll join our Platform R&D team, taking models that have proven themselves in research and shipping them into the product.

Our team builds AI that understands homes, and our generative floor plan engine has moved from proof of concept to a core workflow in Higharc's product. You'll own the applied side of that work:

• The research team hands you a defined problem and a metric.
• You train and adapt the models, build the pipelines around them, and ship a component that meets the product's latency and cost budget.
• You'll work inside an architecture that already exists, making it faster, reproducible, and easy for others to build on.

Expect to:

• Build the component layer around our layout synthesis engine: a documented API contract, a service the product can call, and an evaluation gate that runs on every change.
• Turn model retraining into a one-command job, with benchmarks built in and results the whole team can read.
• Own the latency and cost budgets for learned capabilities.
• Extend core research into new capabilities, such as multi-story plans and real-time editing.
• Partner with infrastructure engineers on MLOps and deployment, and mentor researchers and interns on engineering practices.
• Share your work in writing through weekly status updates, clear pull requests, and design notes before big changes.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional software development, including at least 2 years training and shipping ML models to real users.
• Taken at least one model end to end: data preparation, training, evaluation, serving, and the integration that put it in front of users.
• Fluency in Python and PyTorch (TensorFlow or Keras is fine if you're ready to move to PyTorch).
• Experience with geometric or structured data such as floor plans, CAD or BIM, graphs, or 2D and 3D geometry.
• Built or maintained an evaluation harness or benchmark and used it to gate changes.
• Packaged a model behind an API (FastAPI or similar) and owned its latency and cost.
• A master's degree in computer science, machine learning, or a related field, or equivalent shipped work (a PhD is not required).
• Comfort working remotely with a team on US Eastern hours.

Requirements

• A background in architecture or building, whether that's a degree, professional practice, or AEC software work.
• Experience with constraint solvers like OR-Tools CP-SAT, optimization in general, or generative models for layouts and floor plans.
• Plugin or tooling work in Rhino, Grasshopper, or Revit, or experience with Hugging Face, experiment tracking, and cloud model serving on AWS or Modal, plus any publications or open source contributions.

Benefits

• Remote work and travel: Our company is entirely remote, allowing for more time with family and flexibility to blend work and life.
• Competitive salaries with significant equity in a fast-growing, well-funded company.
• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage, with flexible PTO, and meaningful maternity/paternity leave for all U.S based full-time employees.
• Access to short and long-term disability plans and a 401K.
• Stipend to create the ideal home office and support ongoing learning and development.