---
title: 'Member of Technical Staff, Backend at Highlight AI'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-backend-highlight-ai-san-francisco-df2741mc2s3z'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-07'
---

# Member of Technical Staff, Backend at Highlight AI

- **Company:** Highlight AI
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-01-13
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-07
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/highlightai/5599df8b-fcd8-436c-8943-abd86601a5a2

## 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 Member of Technical Staff to own critical backend infrastructure: the systems behind team management, permissions, LLM efficiency, and integration-driven workflows. You’ll scale our systems with a strong emphasis on performance, reliability, and seamless user experience.

This is a highly technical role for someone who’s excited to work at the intersection of desktop software, native development, and AI integration, and who thrives in a fast-paced, collaborative environment.

Note: this is an on-site role, requiring five days a week in our office.

Job Responsibilities

- Build backend systems that support product growth, including multi-tenant foundations, permissions, and internal/admin tooling
- Design and operate asynchronous processing systems for background workloads and workflow orchestration
- Improve system performance and cost through practical optimizations (caching, batching, efficient data access patterns)
- Build secure, extensible integration infrastructure (authentication, APIs, third-party connectors)
- Raise the bar on backend engineering quality through observability, testing, incident readiness, and operational best practices
- Collaborate cross-functionally to ship features end-to-end while designing backend systems that are durable, extensible, and easy to iterate on

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.

This role is ideal for someone who enjoys building scalable systems, improving observability, and reducing cost through practical optimizations like caching, batching, rollups, and queue-based processing. They’ll partner closely with product and the ML team to ensure Highlight remains reliable and performant as usage scales.

You are a good fit if you have:

- 5+ years of experience at a fast-moving startup with experience shipping production backend systems
- Comfort owning systems end-to-end: from architecture and implementation to deployment, monitoring, and debugging
- Experience building reliable distributed systems (APIs, databases, async jobs, queues, pipelines)
- Experience building real-time systems (WebSockets, pub/sub, event fanout) with low-latency and reliability at scale
- Experience building enterprise-ready multi-tenant systems, including team management, roles/permissions, and admin/internal tooling
- Familiarity with LLM product infrastructure patterns (caching, batching, evals, integrations) is a plus
- Data driven orientation: Be able to effectively measure what you’ve built.
- 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)

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