Research Engineer

Higharc is a VC-backed startup that is changing how new homes are designed and built. They are hiring a Research Engineer to join their Special Projects team, focusing on foundational research in spatial AI for residential construction and developing novel approaches using reinforcement learning, computer vision, and 3D geometry.

Responsibilities:

• Design and conduct original research in spatial reasoning for residential construction, developing models that understand architectural structure, spatial relationships between building components, and the geometric constraints that govern how homes can be built
• Design end-to-end LLM training and fine-tuning pipelines tailored to construction domains, developing domain-specific pre-training and SFT datasets from architectural drawings, building codes, product specifications, and construction documentation
• Apply computer vision techniques to extract semantic structure from architectural inputs and develop multimodal training pipelines that link visual and textual representations of building data, enabling models that reason across drawings, specifications, and code requirements simultaneously
• Develop RL-based approaches for generative architectural design and architect RAG systems that ground LLM outputs in authoritative construction knowledge bases, reducing hallucination for high-stakes building decisions
• Define construction-domain benchmarks, build ground-truth datasets, and establish eval pipelines that measure model performance against real homebuilding tasks rather than generic benchmarks
• Research emerging foundation models and parameter-efficient fine-tuning approaches (LoRA, QLoRA, adapter layers) to inform Higharc's model strategy
• Deliver research outputs ready for integration, including documented model artifacts, serving-ready pipelines, and clear API contracts, and partner with the Prototyping Engineer to deploy fine-tuned models and RAG systems into the Higharc platform