Member of Technical Staff, Full-Stack

highlightai; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Generous equity

Health, dental, and vision insurance

Flexible PTO

Relocation package

Job summary

Highlight is seeking a Member of Technical Staff to own the native desktop runtime across macOS and Windows, delivering low-latency and lightweight execution. The role focuses on production-grade reliability and high-performance design in a fast-paced, collaborative environment.

Ideal candidates have 5+ years shipping native desktop software, strong systems fundamentals, and a track record of reducing latency and resource usage. This is an in-office role based in SF with a strong ownership ethos.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering experience shipping native desktop software.
• Experience building and debugging macOS and/or Windows native systems.
• Track record of improving latency, CPU/memory usage, and stability in production apps.
• Ability to own architecture, implementation, instrumentation, and release across platforms.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture and implementation of Highlight’s native desktop runtime across macOS and Windows.
• Drive improvements to performance, stability, and resource efficiency across native processes.
• Implement robust telemetry, diagnostics, and monitoring to detect regressions and accelerate debugging.
• Collaborate with backend engineering, ML engineering, and product to deliver end-to-end features across the desktop app and backend systems.
• Establish best practices for native development, testing, release processes, and cross-platform compatibility.

Skills

Native desktop software

macOS/Windows

Performance optimization

Telemetry & monitoring

End-to-end ownership

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 seeking a Member of Technical Staff to take ownership of native app aspects across the board. Highlight’s core product depends on capturing context from the user’s device, and we’re looking for a software engineer to own runtime and make it production-grade: low-latency, lightweight, and highly reliable.

This is a highly technical role for someone who’s excited to work at the intersection of desktop software, native development, and AI integration, and who thrives in a fast-paced, collaborative environment.

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

Job Responsibilities

• Own the architecture and implementation of Highlight’s native desktop runtime across macOS and Windows
• Drive improvements to performance, stability, and resource efficiency across native processes
• Implement robust telemetry, diagnostics, and monitoring to detect regressions and accelerate debugging
• Collaborate with backend engineering, ML engineering, and product to deliver end-to-end features across the desktop app and backend systems
• Establish best practices for native development, testing, release processes, and cross-platform compatibility

Profile

We’re looking for someone who is interested in building the AI user experience for the future. We punch above our weight so we value extreme ownership, accountability, and proactiveness.

This role will focus on hard systems problems—ASR reliability, native event capture performance, OCR/accessibility latency, and on-device inference—so Highlight can scale to more users without regressions in responsiveness or quality. The right engineer will be comfortable debugging OS-specific edge cases, improving telemetry and observability, and shipping features that require deep integration with native APIs.

You are a good fit if you have:

• 5+ years of software engineering experience, with significant experience shipping native desktop software.
• Strong systems fundamentals: you write clean, maintainable code and care deeply about performance and reliability.
• Experience building and debugging macOS and/or Windows native systems.
• Track record of improving latency, CPU/memory usage, and stability in production applications.
• Comfort owning systems end-to-end: architecture, implementation, instrumentation, and shipping safely across platforms.
• A bias toward action: you ship quickly, measure impact, and iterate based on real user feedback.
• Data driven orientation: Be able to effectively measure what you’ve built.
• 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.

And even if you don’t fall neatly into any of these buckets, we’re looking for scrappy and motivated self-starters above all. Hustle is expected, grit is required.

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