---
title: 'Head of AI at Highlight AI'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-ai-highlight-ai-san-francisco-mmqzq96tebag'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-14'
---

# Head of AI at Highlight AI

- **Company:** Highlight AI
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-06-16
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-14
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/highlightai/94b9a2fc-afba-4dd3-9967-d8084ec65f45

## Job description

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.

## The Role

We're hiring a Head of AI Engineering to lead and scale our ML and AI efforts as we build the engine that powers Highlight. You'll own the architecture, quality, and roadmap for how we ingest, model, and surface context, starting from data pipelines and evals to the context graph that makes our system truly useful. This is a hands-on leadership role: you'll write code, set technical direction, mentor engineers, and collaborate closely with Backend and Product teams to ship features that feel like magic. We're looking for a technical leader who's equally comfortable diving into model architectures and rallying a team around ambitious goals. You have deep expertise in LLMs, knowledge systems, and retrieval. You're energized by the challenge of building something new. You thrive in ambiguity, ship fast, and hold yourself and your team to a high bar. Note: this is an on-site role, requiring five days a week in our office.

Job Responsibilities

- Own the context graph: architect and build Highlight's memory systems end-to-end, including data ingestion, modeling, retrieval, and evals
- 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)
- Lead the full ML project lifecycle: data pipelines, training, evals, deployment, monitoring, scalability, latency, retraining, A/B testing, and model lifecycle management
- Own output quality across Highlight chat, actions, and workflows; drive toward industry leading acceptance rates.
- Build and lead a world-class ML Engineering team; Establish AI/ML best practices across the broader engineering org.
- Stay current on knowledge representation, continual learning, and retrieval; translate insights into features that feel like magic; Research novel approaches and publish when appropriate.

Profile We’re looking for someone who is interested in building the AI user experience for the future. We punch above our weight so we value extreme ownership, accountability, and proactiveness. The ideal candidate has deep, experienced understanding of LLMs or Knowledge systems, and a track record of shipping production AI systems at scale. You are a good fit if you have:

- 7+ years in ML/AI engineering, with 3+ years leading teams or major technical initiatives
- Master’s or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Statistics, Applied Math or equivalent experience.
- Published research (or experience shipping to production) in knowledge graphs, memory systems, retrieval, or continual learning
- Experience working at top AI labs (e.g. DeepMind, OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta FAIR, xAI) or leading AI application companies (e.g. Google, Cursor, Perplexity)
- Strong architectural chops: you've designed and scaled ML infrastructure from scratch
- Hands-on proficiency with modern ML stacks (PyTorch, TensorFlow, RAG, vector DBs, cloud infra)
- A player-coach mentality: you love mentoring engineers and getting your hands dirty in the code
- Ownership mentality (no task is too small for you) – it’s all hands on deck here and we need everyone rowing the boat.
- Excellent communication skills and a collaborative mindset – we’re extremely lean so we’re looking for a team player who works well with others.
- Type-A tendencies: maybe you’re extremely detail-oriented. Or maybe you take pride in shipping high-quality products. Whatever it is you do, you give it your all.
- Must be based in or willing to relocate to SF – although we’re flexible with days off & schedules, we have a 100% in-office culture during the week.

And even if you don’t fall neatly into any of these buckets, we’re looking for scrappy and motivated self-starters above all. Hustle is expected, grit is required.

## Perks

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

## About Highlight AI

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Highlight AI provides an autonomous AI layer that captures team context from meetings, messages, and tools to proactively coordinate work, automate workflows, and reduce context switching.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series A, $40M led by Khosla Ventures in March 2026)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2024
- **Founders**: Karim Atiyeh (CEO, per company site), Pim de Witte (Co-founder, Chairman), and Sergei Sorokin (Co-founder & CEO, per LinkedIn — note conflicting title)

## Core Business
- **Primary industries**: AI-powered productivity and team coordination software
- **Target customers**: B2B, knowledge-worker teams (product managers, engineers, designers, recruiters, and any cross-functional group)  
- **Mission**: Replace manual prompting with autonomous, proactive assistance and build a shared team memory so coordination effort is minimized and teams can focus on building.

## Products & Services
- **Highlight (the core platform)**: An AI assistant that integrates with tools like Slack, Linear, Notion, email, and calendars. It captures every commitment, decision, and action from calls, messages, and docs into a shared memory; automatically drafts next steps, sets reminders, and runs predefined workflows. Available as a desktop app (Windows & Mac) and as a “teammate” that operates across all apps.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not disclosed
- **Key Metric**: $50.1M total funding (Seed $10.1M in Oct 2024 led by General Catalyst; Series A $40M in March 2026 led by Khosla Ventures)
- **Notable Investors & Partners**: General Catalyst (seed), Khosla Ventures (Series A)
- **Growth Signals**: Hundreds of thousands of self-serve users; now in early access with organizations; employee count grew 8.3% YoY to 13 people; hiring for senior roles (Head of AI, Senior ML Engineer, Founding Product Marketer).

## Competitive Advantages
- **Shared team memory**: Captures high-fidelity context (screen, audio, decisions) automatically, eliminating the need to manually document handoffs.
- **Proactive automation**: Highlight acts before being asked — drafts Linear tickets, Slack summaries, and reminders without human prompts.
- **Multi-agent platform vision**: Plans to let developers build multiplayer agents on top of its context layer, creating a moat around organizational knowledge.
- **Team-first design**: Focuses on reducing coordination overhead (the “coordination tax”) rather than just making individuals faster.

## Strategic Focus
- Build a 10x context-capture system and shared memory layer for teams.
- Evolve that layer into a proactive command center that orchestrates work across tools.
- Open a platform for developers to deploy agents and fine-tuned world models that learn by observing team workflows.
- Expand from hundreds of thousands of individual users to enterprise-scale deployments.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Small, high-autonomy team of systems thinkers and builders from Discord, Medal.tv, and Meta. Emphasizes “building something that matters” and obsession with user behavior and detail.
- **Work environment**: San Francisco-based; hybrid likely given small size and need for deep collaboration.
- **Engineering ethos**: Focus on solving hard problems in context, autonomy, and collective intelligence — not just feature delivery.
- **Growth stage**: Early-stage with strong funding, so engineers and product builders can have outsized impact.

## Sources
1. [highlightai.com/about](https://highlightai.com/about)
2. [highlightai.com](https://highlightai.com/)
3. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/highlightai](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/highlightai)
4. [linkedin.com/company/tryhighlight](https://www.linkedin.com/company/tryhighlight)
5. [highlightai.com/mission](https://highlightai.com/mission)

## Other roles at Highlight AI

- [Early Career Product Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/early-career-product-engineer-highlight-ai-san-francisco-5h5e7f99can9) — San Francisco, CA
- [Operations Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/operations-manager-highlight-ai-san-francisco-gf027bm71gqd) — San Francisco, CA
- [Member of Design Staff](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-design-staff-highlight-ai-san-francisco-5vcsfkxn8r09) — San Francisco, CA
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