Prototype Engineer

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.

Higharc is seeking a Prototyping Engineer to join our rapidly growing Special Projects team. In this role, you'll take foundational AI/ML research and integrate new capabilities into the Higharc platform.

What You'll Do

Operating in lock-step with our broader engineering organization, this engineer will test prototypes with customers, evaluate results, and promote proven capabilities to the full product. Expect to:

• Design and develop tools that expose AI/ML capabilities to autonomous agents, building the orchestration layer that solves complex domain use-cases in production homebuilding.

• Take proven research outputs and integrate them into the Higharc product as packages and components, following best practices established in a large, complex codebase.

• Work across the Python ML/AI service layer and the TypeScript/React product, wiring new capabilities end-to-end via API.

• Build frameworks for rapid evaluation, iteration, and promotion of prototypes.

• Operate in lock-step with the broader engineering organization and participate in customer-facing labs sessions, using direct customer signal to validate prototypes and inform iteration priorities.

• Serve as the primary translation layer between the research team and the product engineering team.

• Convert experimental notebooks, fine-tuned models, and RAG pipelines into maintainable, testable, deployable code.

• Develop working knowledge of the homebuilding domain sufficient to make independent judgment calls about which capabilities matter, which edge-cases are load-bearing, and where AI falls short in the built environment.

About You

You're an empathetic and high-impact engineer who bridges the gap between research output and production software. You believe that homebuilding is a real and complex domain worth understanding deeply, not a generic vertical to slap AI onto. You have excellent judgement and collaboration skills, and treat the boundary between reesarch and product as shared territory, not "someone else's problem".

You have:

• 4+ years of professional Software Engineering experience, with 2+ years integrating ML/AI capabilities into production products

• Shipped AI-powered features to real users, not just model training

• Experience working in or adjacent to a research team

• Professional proficiency with Python, Typescript/React, API design, LLM tooling, evaluation design, and AI calibration

• Familiarity with LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, or open-source), vector databases, RAG architectures, Python ML ecosystem (PyTorch, HuggingFace), modern frontend frameworks (React/Next.js), CI/CD and testing frameworks

A major plus if you also bring:

• Experience in construction, AEC, or other physical-world domains with messy, under-structured data

• Experience with agentic frameworks (LangChain, CrewAI, or custom harnesses) strongly preferred

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.