Early Career Product Engineer

Highlight AI•San Francisco, CA

22h•$150,000 - $230,000•Onsite

About The Position

Highlight is building a shared intelligence layer for the modern workforce. Highlight unifies context across every person and tool on your team, seamlessly bridging information silos. It evolves with your organization to proactively route knowledge and reliably automate workflows. We're looking for an early-career engineer who is a builder at heart. You might have a few years of professional experience, but you've probably also built things outside of work: contributed to open source, tinkered with new technologies, launched a side project, built an app for fun, or gone down a technical rabbit hole simply because you were curious. At Highlight, you'll work across the stack and own real product problems end-to-end. You'll work closely with product, design, backend, and ML to figure out what users need, build it, ship it, and learn from what happens next. You don't need to know everything coming in. In fact, one of the things we value most is the ability to learn quickly and confidently jump into things you haven't done before. Note: this is an on-site role, requiring five days a week in our San Francisco office.

Requirements

2-4 years of software engineering experience, or equivalent experience building software independently.
Strong fundamentals and can write clean, thoughtful, maintainable code.
Built and shipped things outside of your day job - side projects, open-source software, apps, tools, or anything else you're proud of.
Naturally curious and genuinely enjoy learning how things work.
Demonstrated that you can pick up unfamiliar technologies quickly.
Want to work across the stack rather than specialize narrowly in one layer.
Care about the end user and want to understand the why behind what you're building.
Comfortable with ambiguity and can turn an open-ended problem into something concrete.
Have a bias toward action: you like building, shipping, getting feedback, and iterating.
Take ownership of outcomes rather than waiting for someone to tell you exactly what to do.
Collaborative and enjoy working through hard problems with other people.
Care about quality, but understand that the right answer isn't always to build the perfect thing before shipping.
Excited by AI and curious about how it can fundamentally change the way people use computers.

Nice To Haves

Significant open-source contributions or a project with real users.
Experience building AI-powered products or using LLMs in your own projects.
Experience with React, TypeScript, Python, or similar modern technologies.
Experience building desktop, mobile, or developer tools.
Experience at a startup or in a small engineering team.
A history of teaching yourself technologies that weren't part of your formal role.

Responsibilities

Build and ship product features across the stack, from user-facing experiences to backend systems.
Work directly with product and design to understand user problems and turn ambiguous ideas into simple, useful experiences.
Own meaningful pieces of the product end-to-end: understand the problem, propose a solution, build it, measure it, and iterate.
Work with AI and ML systems to create experiences that understand context and proactively help users.
Contribute across areas like context storage and retrieval, desktop experiences, integrations, and AI-powered workflows.
Learn new technologies and parts of the stack as needed rather than staying confined to a single specialty.
Help us build the engineering practices, systems, and product instincts that will allow a small team to move quickly without sacrificing quality.