Research Engineer

Higharc, a VC-backed startup transforming home design and construction, seeks a Research Engineer to conduct foundational research in spatial AI at the intersection of reinforcement learning, computer vision, LLMs, and 3D geometry. The role involves designing end-to-end LLM training pipelines, applying computer vision to architectural inputs, developing RL-based generative design and RAG systems, and defining construction-domain benchmarks.

• Design and conduct original research in spatial reasoning for residential construction
• Build end-to-end LLM training and fine-tuning pipelines for construction domains
• Apply computer vision and multimodal training to link visual and textual building data
• Develop RL-based generative architectural design and RAG systems grounded in construction knowledge bases
• Define construction-domain benchmarks and evaluation pipelines
• Research foundation models and parameter-efficient fine-tuning (LoRA, QLoRA)
• Deliver production-ready model artifacts and partner on deployment

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with 2+ years on LLM development, fine-tuning, or applied ML systems in production
• Hands-on experience with HuggingFace Transformers, PyTorch, and domain-specific fine-tuning
• Practical experience with RAG architectures, vector databases (Pinecone, Weaviate, pgvector), and embedding model selection