Senior ML Engineer

About the Role

Highlight is the shared intelligence layer that coordinates humans and AI agents across every platform. This is a Series A startup with $40M raised, led by Khosla Ventures with General Catalyst and Valor Equity, and led by CEO Sergei Sorokin, former Discord VP Product who scaled Discord to 300M+ users. We're building an intelligent operating system for teams and AI agents to eliminate the coordination tax.

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

Qualifications

• 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

Pay

$200K/yr - $350K/yr

About Jobright TNT

This role is part of the Jobright TNT - the private hiring network connecting top talent with top AI startups like Perplexity, Mercor, Cresta, Suno and 150 more. This is not a mass job posting. Only select, high-signal candidates are invited to Jobright TNT and recommended directly to hiring teams.

If this is your first time applying to a Jobright TNT role, the process works as follows:

• Apply to your first Jobright TNT role
• We review your background to determine if you meet the TNT quality bar
• If qualified, your application is directly recommended to the employer
• Once accepted into TNT, you may be invited to apply for other exclusive TNT-only roles or invited to private, invite-only hiring events with top startups

You will be notified of your TNT selection result. All Jobright TNT roles are 100% real, directly hired by top AI startups we partner with, and come with priority review and higher response rates than the normal application queue.