[Hiring] Forward Deployed Engineer @Higharc

Role Description

Higharc is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer to join as one of the founding roles on our new Forward Deployed team. You'll work embedded alongside a large production homebuilder to turn plans into actionable data.

A homebuilder's plan library is the product data behind its entire business — and at enterprise scale, that data is almost entirely unstructured. Plans live as drawing sets scattered across semi-autonomous divisions, renamed and re-numbered as they move. Nobody can say with confidence which plans are duplicates, how many versions of a given home exist, or what actually varies between them.

Higharc converts those catalogs into structured, queryable plan data, and builds the analysis on top of it:

• Searchable plan libraries with agent-enabled natural-language search
• Geometric similarity scoring that surfaces plans which have forked under different names
• Structured mapping of what varies across a library
• Classification that makes consolidation decisions possible

This role is for someone who wants to build against real, messy data in front of the customer, not two abstractions removed from it.

Expect to:

• Embed with HQ, regional, and division teams to run technical discovery — profile plan assets, assess data quality, and reverse-engineer how each division's drawing sets encode variation
• Build and ship the searchable plan library, analytics dashboard, and agent-enabled natural-language search — own the pipeline from raw plan ingestion through structured, queryable output
• Tune and extend Higharc's Autotranslate AI capabilities to identify, categorize, and translate floorplans into data
• Work hands-on with the data — write the ETL, build against internal APIs, and ship working capability back to users directly rather than handing off a spec
• Build geometric similarity scoring and classification models that surface plans which have forked under different names
• Meet delivery milestones — coverage targets, data-field completeness, QA error thresholds — and flag tradeoffs in real time when schedule pressure argues against them
• Instrument and quantify results: redundancy across a catalog, dimensional spread on repeated conditions, consolidation candidates, and the purchasing leverage each one represents
• Partner with the Forward Deployed Product Manager, Technical Lead, QA, Intake Specialists, and Client Strategy, and present technical progress and tradeoffs to executive stakeholders
• Build the repeatable version — turn one-off scripts and data patterns into reusable tooling that lets the forward deployed model work on the next engagement, not just the current one
• Travel to client sites and company events up to 30% of the time

Qualifications

• 5+ years of engineering experience, including significant time in customer-facing or deployed settings — forward deployed engineering, solutions engineering, technical consulting, or professional services
• Strong hands-on data fluency: SQL, scripting against APIs, comfort in notebooks, and a habit of interrogating a data set yourself rather than requesting a pull
• Experience prototyping to validate ideas quickly using tools like Cursor, Replit, or V0.dev
• A track record building structured data models, taxonomies, or classification schemes and getting a system to actually run on them in production
• Strong judgment about data quality — what level of accuracy a decision requires, and what it costs to get there
• Excellent written and verbal communication, including with executive stakeholders who have limited time and no patience for status without substance
• Willingness to travel to client sites and company events up to 30% of the time

Requirements

• Background in residential construction, homebuilding, architecture, or AEC technology — especially fluency with plan sets, elevations, options, and how builders manage plan variation
• Experience with agent-based or natural-language search over structured data, RAG systems, or LLM-powered analytics
• Exposure to geometric or spatial data — CAD/BIM, computer vision on drawings, similarity and clustering methods
• Experience working with large, messy, enterprise-scale data migrations or ingestion programs
• Having built a function from zero: first hire into a new team, new practice, or new delivery model

Benefits

• Competitive salaries with significant equity
• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage
• Flexible PTO
• 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
• Support for ongoing learning and development