Research Engineer

The role

You will conduct foundational research in spatial AI for residential construction. You will develop novel approaches using reinforcement learning, computer vision, LLMs, and 3D geometry.

What you will do

• Design and conduct original research in spatial reasoning for residential construction
• Design end-to-end LLM training and fine-tuning pipelines tailored to construction domains
• Apply computer vision techniques to extract semantic structure from architectural inputs
• Develop RL-based approaches for generative architectural design
• Architect RAG systems that ground LLM outputs in authoritative construction knowledge bases
• Define construction-domain benchmarks and build ground-truth datasets
• Research emerging foundation models and parameter-efficient fine-tuning approaches
• Deliver research outputs including documented model artifacts and serving-ready pipelines
• Partner with the Prototyping Engineer to deploy models and RAG systems

Required qualifications

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience
• 2+ years directly on LLM development, fine-tuning, or applied ML systems in production
• Hands-on experience with model training frameworks (HuggingFace Transformers, PyTorch)
• Practical experience with RAG architectures, vector databases (Pinecone, Weaviate, pgvector), and embedding model selection
• Experience with 3D modeling, computational geometry, or computer graphics in a research or production context
• Strong proficiency in Python across the ML ecosystem
• React/TypeScript proficiency for integration work
• Master's degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, AI, or a closely related field

Nice to have

• Ph.D., particularly for candidates focused on model research and pre-training
• Open-source contributions or published research
• Familiarity with BIM tools (Revit, AutoCAD) or BIM data formats (IFC, gbXML)
• Experience with Three.js or equivalent 3D frameworks

Benefits

• competitive salaries with significant equity
• comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage
• flexible PTO
• meaningful maternity/paternity leave to all U.S based employees that are full-time
• short and long-term disability plans
• 401K
• stipend to create the ideal home office
• support ongoing L&D

About the company

Higharc is a VC-backed startup that is changing how new homes are designed and built. The founding team has shipped products for Autodesk, Electronic Arts, Nike, and Apple.