Senior Machine Learning Engineer / Researcher (SF)

Job Title: Senior Machine Learning Engineer / Researcher

Location: NYC or SF (On-site)

About Highlight AI

Highlight AI is a cutting-edge desktop assistant designed to enhance productivity by seamlessly integrating with your workflow. We empower users to interact with any application using text and voice commands, eliminating the need to switch between tools. After raising a seed round from investors like Khosla Ventures, Sapphire Ventures, General Catalyst, Valor Equity, SV Angel, and Conviction Fund, we’re now in hypergrowth mode and expanding our team.

The Role

As a Senior Machine Learning Engineer, you will drive the design, development, and deployment of advanced ML models and systems that power our core product features. You will collaborate closely with product, engineering, and data teams to translate research into production-ready services, while also advancing our longer-term R&D roadmap.

This is a highly technical role for someone who’s excited to work at the intersection of desktop software, native development, and AI integration, and who thrives in a fast-paced, collaborative environment.

Note: this is an on-site role, requiring five days a week in our NYC headquarters.

Job Responsibilities

• Design and implement knowledge graph or memory systems to enable contextual retrieval, reasoning, and persistent knowledge for the core Highlight application

• Research, prototype and deploy state-of-the-art machine learning text and OCR models (e.g., transformer architectures, computer vision, time series forecasting, reinforcement learning)

• Build pipelines for data ingestion, feature engineering, model training, evaluation, and deployment

• Work on productionizing models: monitoring, scalability, latency, retraining, A/B testing, and model lifecycle management

• Develop infrastructure and tooling to support ML experimentation and production (e.g., model serving, MLOps, observability)

• Collaborate with cross-functional partners (product managers, software engineers, UX researchers) to integrate ML features into product flows

• Keep abreast of latest ML/AI research, propose novel approaches, publish (internally or externally) when appropriate

• Participate in architecture discussions & technical direction for ML/AI at the company

Profile

We’re looking for someone who is interested in building the AI user experience for the future. We punch above our weight so we value extreme ownership, accountability, and proactiveness. The ideal candidate combines technical prowess with strong leadership skills. You might be a good fit if you have:

• A Master’s or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Statistics, Applied Math or equivalent experience.

  • Solid understanding of ML fundamentals: supervised & unsupervised learning, deep learning, model evaluation metrics, deployment, inference latency trade-offs

  • Familiarity with knowledge representation and retrieval: building or leveraging knowledge graphs, embeddings, and memory systems to support contextual inference and long-term model learning

• 5+ years of hands-on experience building machine learning models in production environments – we ship features fast, so we need someone who can keep up.

  • Experience deploying models at scale in production (AWS/GCP/Azure)

  • Experience with data engineering (ETL pipelines, feature stores, large datasets) and production-grade MLOps (CI/CD, monitoring, retraining workflows)

• Bonus / preferred:

  • Published research or open-source contributions

  • Experience with genAI (LLMs, diffusion models), computer vision, multimodal ML

  • Knowledge of prompt engineering, RAG, embeddings

• Ownership mentality (no task is too small for you) – it’s all hands on deck here and we need everyone rowing the boat.

• Deep understanding of system architecture and design patterns – we’re looking for someone who can hit the ground running day one.

• Excellent communication skills and a collaborative mindset – we’re extremely lean so we’re looking for a team player who works well with others.

• Type-A tendencies: maybe you’re extremely detail-oriented. Or maybe you take pride in shipping high-quality products. Whatever it is you do, you give it your all.

• Must be based in or willing to relocate to NYC – although we’re flexible with days off & schedules, we have a 100% in-office culture during the week.

And even if you don’t fall neatly into any of these buckets, we’re looking for scrappy and motivated self-starters above all. Hustle is expected, grit is required.

Perks

• Competitive salary and generous equity package

• Health, dental, and vision insurance

• Flexible PTO and parental leave

• Paid team lunches during the week

• Relocation package