---
title: 'Member of Technical Staff, ML at Highlight AI'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-ml-highlight-ai-san-francisco-52ykf9gwfnxx'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-07'
---

# Member of Technical Staff, ML at Highlight AI

- **Company:** Highlight AI
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-01-20
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-07
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/highlightai/03585802-04e9-4a81-b859-8cadc6bc1385

## 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 help build the AI systems that power Highlight. You will work across the full ML stack: data pipelines, model training, retrieval, ranking, evals, and deployment. You will ship features that make Highlight feel like magic. This is a hands on IC role where you will own critical systems end to end and collaborate closely with our Head of AI Engineering to scale our ML capabilities.

You will thrive here if you love shipping production ML systems, obsess over output quality, and want to work on hard problems with real user impact. We move fast, hold a high bar, and believe the best ideas win regardless of title.

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

Job Responsibilities

- Design, build, and optimize ML pipelines for context retrieval, action detection, and output generation
- Implement and iterate on RAG systems, ranking models, and prompt engineering to improve quality
- Build comprehensive evals and monitoring to measure and improve ML system performance
- Investigate alternative models and fine tuning approaches for our heavy background processing workloads, implementing better systems to increase quality while improving cost efficiency
- Collaborate with Backend and Product Engineering to ship AI powered features
- Contribute to ML infrastructure decisions and best practices across the engineering org
- Stay current on LLM advances, retrieval techniques, and ML tooling; bring insights back to the team

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 is a master craftsman who enjoys building great products with LLMs at scale.

You are a good fit if you have:

- 4+ years in ML/AI engineering, with significant experience shipping production systems
- Strong software engineering fundamentals: you write clean, maintainable code
- Deep experience with retrieval, ranking, RAG, or search systems at scale
- Hands on proficiency with PyTorch, vector databases, and modern ML infrastructure
- Experience with LLM applications (prompt engineering, fine tuning, eval frameworks)
- Product thinker: understands how to connect great ML products to constraints, evals, and modeling when building them
- A bias toward action: you ship fast, measure rigorously, and iterate based on data
- 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 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
- [Head of AI](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-ai-highlight-ai-san-francisco-mmqzq96tebag) — San Francisco, CA
- [Member of Design Staff](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-design-staff-highlight-ai-san-francisco-5vcsfkxn8r09) — San Francisco, CA
- [Member of Technical Staff, Backend](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-backend-highlight-ai-san-francisco-df2741mc2s3z) — San Francisco, CA
- [Member of Technical Staff, Full-Stack](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-full-stack-highlight-ai-san-francisco-gphmnw0xycxb) — San Francisco, CA