Architecture Lead, Read to Build

Higharc•Remote, Remote

1d•Remote

About The Position

Higharc is seeking an accomplished Architecture Lead to build the design system that will power a new line of turn-key home plans for small- and mid-sized builders across the country. This role sits at the intersection of residential architecture, systems thinking, and product design. You're not here to design individual homes — you're here to design the system that produces them. That means developing a composable "kit of parts": catalogs of rooms, room groupings, and massings that function as reusable building blocks, assembled according to rules you define. You'll work closely with plan development specialists who bring deep knowledge of builder needs, code compliance, and market dynamics. Together, you'll translate that knowledge into structured, repeatable frameworks — design decisions encoded into software that can power homes at scale. You don't need to be a software engineer, but you should be excited about what it means for design logic to live inside a platform. This is genuinely new territory. You'll be defining a design discipline that doesn't fully exist yet, which means there will be ambiguity. The opportunity is to shape it.

Requirements

Experience in residential architecture with hands-on home design and construction knowledge
A systems design mindset — you're drawn to designing the rules, not just applying them
Comfort at the intersection of design and technology, and enthusiasm for encoding design decisions into software
Experience with parametric design tools and computational approaches
A licensed architect credential
Strong collaboration instincts — you can work across disciplines and translate between design intuition and technical constraints

Nice To Haves

Experience with catalog housing, plan libraries, or product-line residential design
Exposure to prefab, modular, or mass-customization housing approaches
Familiarity with BIM platforms and computational design tools like Grasshopper or Dynamo

Responsibilities

Develop catalogs of rooms, groupings, and massings designed as reusable components with defined relationships, constraints, and configuration logic
Establish the rules of assembly — what connects, what's constrained, what produces structurally sound and aesthetically coherent homes
Translate deep residential design intuition into structured, repeatable patterns that can be systematized
Partner with plan development leads to ensure the design system produces homes that are buildable, code-compliant, and market-ready
Contribute to standard details, design guidelines, and modeling best practices that support automation and scalability
Help define a new programming language, in effect, for how homes are created