Staff Software Engineer, Data & AI Products

Highlight is the definitive product intelligence platform enabling brands to create products people love. Powered by a proprietary community, seamless logistics, expert research methodologies, and AI-driven analytics, Highlight’s platform is purpose-built for modern physical product teams and trusted by leading brands, top retailers, and emerging innovators alike. The Highlight platform delivers high-impact insights with unmatched quality across every stage of the product innovation lifecycle—from early ideas and prototypes to in-market renovation—empowering teams to act quickly and bring winning products to market with confidence.

About the role

In this role, you'll turn years of highly credible human test data into models brands can trust. That means predicting how consumers will respond, surfacing what matters in their feedback, and proving our AI is right before customers rely on it. You've shipped ML- and LLM-powered products at a startup before, and you're ready to apply that expertise to shaping Highlight's platform, technology, and culture for years to come.

Problems you’ll work on

• Unifying our data layer across studies, surveys, video, and tester feedback
• Refining the pipelines and evaluations that give us confidence that an AI feature is good enough to ship
• Building synthetic consumer panels (Digital Twins) and proving how well they predict real human responses
• Modeling response quality and panelist reliability across our community of 60,000+ Highlighters
• Extracting themes, sentiment, and nuance from open-ended responses and video at scale
• Developing agents that help brands design studies and draw meaningful insight from the results

Working at Highlight

At Highlight, you'll be joining a high-velocity, high-ownership culture that measures itself by our positive impact on our customers and the world (not story points). To help make our mission a reality, you'll:

• Frame ambiguous product questions as modeling problems, choose the right approach (from classical ML to LLMs), and take it from experiment to production
• Own offline and online evaluation: benchmarks, golden datasets, human-labeled ground truth, and metrics that tie model quality to customer outcomes
• Prompt, fine-tune, and orchestrate LLMs and embedding models, and know when a simpler model wins
• Build the data foundation and take your models all the way to production on our platform.
• Partner with Product and Research to design how people work alongside AI: when to trust its output, how to correct it, and how those corrections make it better
• See around corners by anticipating bias, leakage, overfitting, drift, and cost/latency tradeoffs before they reach customers
• Build and ship across our Engineering roadmap, especially our data and AI products
• Understand and directly advance Highlight's mission

What we're looking for

Highlight was founded to make the hardest parts of physical product testing easy. Even if you're new to the space, we'd love to see your own experience taking AI products from rough idea to production. You might be a great fit if you have:

• 6+ years in applied ML or data science, including shipping at least one ML- or LLM-powered product to production at an early-stage company
• Depth in NLP and LLMs: embeddings, retrieval, fine-tuning, and rigorous evaluation of generative systems
• Hands-on experience designing ETL/ELT pipelines and data models that serve both analytics and AI workloads
• Solid statistical foundations: experimental design, sampling, and knowing when a result is real
• Experience turning messy, human-generated data (surveys, reviews, free text, video) into reliable model inputs
• Proficiency in TypeScript and the core of our stack (Next.js, ai-sdk, PostgreSQL); C#/.NET is a plus
• Bonus points for Python for data and ML work, a data science or ML background, or experience operating CI/CD pipelines (we use GitHub Actions, Terraform, and helm), production systems (AWS, EKS), or observability platforms (Grafana/OTel) aligned with our stack

Beyond your experience

We're building a culture that will serve Highlight far beyond our current, early stage, and all of us have a big part to play. To that end, we prize humans who are:

• Owners. As the technical leader of our AI function, you'll take initiative, deliver results, and inspire the people around you to do the same.
• Impact-driven. You'll understand your users' needs and take ownership in delivering value on their behalf
• Great teammates. You'll share our team's commitment to learning and growth and thrive in collaboration with the humans around you
• Curious. You'll go the extra mile to understand the "why" behind your work, seeing ambiguity and open questions as opportunities to learn and overdeliver

Benefits

• Health insurance (medical, dental, vision) with 100% of employee premiums covered
• Unlimited PTO
• Flexible, remote WFH culture
• Generous paid maternity & parental leave
• 401k account
• $50/month WFH reimbursement
• Based on previous experience and skillset, the starting salary range for this position is $170,000 - $210,000