Senior Machine Learning Engineer​/Researcher; NYC

Senior Machine Learning Engineer / Researcher (NYC)

Base Pay Range: $250,000 / year – $300,000 / year

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

As a Senior Machine Learning Engineer, you will design, develop, and deploy 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 excited to work at the intersection of desktop software, native development, and AI integration, thriving in a fast‑paced, collaborative environment.

Location: NYC – required on‑site five days a week.

• 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.
• Productionize models: monitoring, scalability, latency, retraining, A/B testing, and model lifecycle management.
• Develop infrastructure and tooling to support ML experimentation and production (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, and publish internally or externally when appropriate.
• Participate in architecture discussions and technical direction for ML/AI at the company.

• 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.
• 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 too small.
• Deep understanding of system architecture and design patterns.
• Excellent communication skills and a collaborative mindset.
• Type‑A tendencies – detail‑oriented, proud of shipping high‑quality products.
• Must be based in or willing to relocate to NYC; flexible with days off & schedules, but we have a 100% in‑office culture during the week.

• Competitive salary and generous equity package.
• Health, dental, and vision insurance.
• Flexible PTO and parental leave.
• Paid team lunches during the week.
• Relocation package.