Senior Machine Learning Engineer / Researcher (AI)

TL;DR

Senior Machine Learning Engineer / Researcher (AI): Designing, developing, and deploying advanced ML models and systems for a desktop assistant with an accent on knowledge graph implementation, state-of-the-art model research, and productionizing ML features. Focus on solving complex challenges at the intersection of desktop software, native development, and AI integration, ensuring scalability and low latency.

Location: On-site in NYC or SF. Must be based in or willing to relocate to NYC (5 days a week in-office culture).

Salary: $250,000–$300,000

Company

Highlight AI is a cutting-edge desktop assistant enhancing productivity by enabling users to interact with any application using text and voice commands.

What you will do

• Design and implement knowledge graph or memory systems to enable contextual retrieval and persistent knowledge for the core application.
• Research, prototype, and deploy state-of-the-art machine learning models (e.g., text, OCR, transformer architectures, computer vision, time series forecasting, reinforcement learning).
• Build pipelines for data ingestion, feature engineering, model training, evaluation, and deployment.
• Work on productionizing models, including monitoring, scalability, latency, retraining, and A/B testing.
• Develop infrastructure and tooling to support ML experimentation and production (e.g., model serving, MLOps, observability).
• Collaborate with cross-functional partners to integrate ML features into product flows.

Requirements

• 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, including building or leveraging knowledge graphs, embeddings, and memory systems.
• 5+ years of hands-on experience building machine learning models in production environments.
• Experience deploying models at scale in production (AWS/GCP/Azure) and with production-grade MLOps (CI/CD, monitoring, retraining workflows).
• Must be based in or willing to relocate to NYC.

Nice to have

• Published research or open-source contributions.
• Experience with GenAI (LLMs, diffusion models), computer vision, or multimodal ML.
• Knowledge of prompt engineering, RAG, and embeddings.

Culture & Benefits

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