Research Engineer

Higharc

3d•Remote

About The Position

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 hiring a Research Engineer to join our Special Projects team. In this role, you'll conduct foundational research in spatial AI for residential construction — developing novel approaches at the intersection of reinforcement learning, computer vision, LLMs, and 3D geometry to solve problems that have no off-the-shelf solutions.

Requirements

5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with 2+ years directly on LLM development, fine-tuning, or applied ML systems in production
Hands-on experience with model training frameworks (HuggingFace Transformers, PyTorch) and fine-tuning workflows on domain-specific corpora
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
A Master's degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, AI, or a closely related field

Nice To Haves

A 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

Responsibilities

Design and conduct original research in spatial reasoning for residential construction, developing models that understand architectural structure, spatial relationships between building components, and the geometric constraints that govern how homes can be built.
Design end-to-end LLM training and fine-tuning pipelines tailored to construction domains, developing domain-specific pre-training and SFT datasets from architectural drawings, building codes, product specifications, and construction documentation.
Apply computer vision techniques to extract semantic structure from architectural inputs and develop multimodal training pipelines that link visual and textual representations of building data, enabling models that reason across drawings, specifications, and code requirements simultaneously.
Develop RL-based approaches for generative architectural design and architect RAG systems that ground LLM outputs in authoritative construction knowledge bases, reducing hallucination for high-stakes building decisions.
Define construction-domain benchmarks, build ground-truth datasets, and establish eval pipelines that measure model performance against real homebuilding tasks rather than generic benchmarks. Research emerging foundation models and parameter-efficient fine-tuning approaches (LoRA, QLoRA, adapter layers) to inform Higharc's model strategy.
Deliver research outputs ready for integration, including documented model artifacts, serving-ready pipelines, and clear API contracts, and partner with the Prototyping Engineer to deploy fine-tuned models and RAG systems into the Higharc platform.

Benefits

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.

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