Early Career Product Engineer

Highlight; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Equity

Health insurance

Flexible PTO

Relocation package

In-office culture in SF

Job summary

Highlight is building a shared intelligence layer for the modern workforce. We’re seeking an early-career engineer who loves building, shipping, and learning quickly. You’ll own real product problems end-to-end, work across the stack with product, design, backend, and ML, and ship features that help users move fast.

This on-site role requires five days a week in our San Francisco office. We value curiosity, practical demonstrations of learning new tech, and ownership of outcomes.

Qualifications

• 2-4 years of software engineering experience or equivalent
• Strong fundamentals with clean, maintainable code
• Built and shipped things outside of day job (side projects, open-source, apps)

Responsibilities

• Build and ship product features across the stack, from user-facing experiences to backend systems
• Work with product and design to understand user problems and turn ideas into useful experiences
• Own meaningful pieces of the product end-to-end: understand, propose, build, measure, iterate
• Work with AI/ML systems to create experiences that understand context and help users
• Contribute across areas like context storage/retrieval, desktop experiences, integrations, AI-powered workflows
• Learn new technologies and parts of the stack as needed
• Help build engineering practices and systems for a small, fast-moving team

Skills

2-4 years experience

Strong fundamentals

Open-source projects

Curious learner

End-to-end ownership

Tools

React

TypeScript

Python

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 looking for an early-career engineer who is a builder at heart.

You might have a few years of professional experience, but you've probably also built things outside of work: contributed to open source, tinkered with new technologies, launched a side project, built an app for fun, or gone down a technical rabbit hole simply because you were curious.

At Highlight, you'll work across the stack and own real product problems end-to-end. You'll work closely with product, design, backend, and ML to figure out what users need, build it, ship it, and learn from what happens next.

You don't need to know everything coming in. In fact, one of the things we value most is the ability to learn quickly and confidently jump into things you haven't done before.

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

Job Responsibilities

• Build and ship product features across the stack, from user-facing experiences to backend systems.
• Work directly with product and design to understand user problems and turn ambiguous ideas into simple, useful experiences.
• Own meaningful pieces of the product end-to-end: understand the problem, propose a solution, build it, measure it, and iterate.
• Work with AI and ML systems to create experiences that understand context and proactively help users.
• Contribute across areas like context storage and retrieval, desktop experiences, integrations, and AI-powered workflows.
• Learn new technologies and parts of the stack as needed rather than staying confined to a single specialty.
• Help us build the engineering practices, systems, and product instincts that will allow a small team to move quickly without sacrificing quality.

Profile

You don't need to check every box. We're much more interested in how you learn, what you build, and how you approach problems.

You may be a great fit if you:

• Have 2-4 years of software engineering experience, or equivalent experience building software independently.
• Have strong fundamentals and can write clean, thoughtful, maintainable code.
• Have built and shipped things outside of your day job - side projects, open-source software, apps, tools, or anything else you're proud of.
• Are naturally curious and genuinely enjoy learning how things work.
• Have demonstrated that you can pick up unfamiliar technologies quickly.
• Want to work across the stack rather than specialize narrowly in one layer.
• Care about the end user and want to understand the why behind what you're building.
• Are comfortable with ambiguity and can turn an open-ended problem into something concrete.
• Have a bias toward action: you like building, shipping, getting feedback, and iterating.
• Take ownership of outcomes rather than waiting for someone to tell you exactly what to do.
• Are collaborative and enjoy working through hard problems with other people.
• Care about quality, but understand that the right answer isn't always to build the perfect thing before shipping.
• Are excited by AI and curious about how it can fundamentally change the way people use computers.

Bonus Points

• Significant open-source contributions or a project with real users.
• Experience building AI-powered products or using LLMs in your own projects.
• Experience with React, TypeScript, Python, or similar modern technologies.
• Experience building desktop, mobile, or developer tools.
• Experience at a startup or in a small engineering team.
• A history of teaching yourself technologies that weren't part of your formal role.

Perks

• Competitive salary and generous equity package
• Health, dental, and vision insurance
• Flexible PTO and parental leave
• Paid team lunches and dinners during the week
• Relocation package
• 100% in-office culture in San Francisco

Compensation Range: $150K - $230K