Senior SWE, Full-Stack

About Highlight AI

We're a small, senior team building the intelligent OS for the agentic age. Highlight is a proactive AI that captures your team's context, surfaces what matters, and handles the busywork so you can focus on decisions and building. We ship fast, obsess over craft, and care deeply about user experience and trust. Backed by General Catalyst, Valor, SV Angel, and Conviction, we’re looking for like-minded people to help define how the next generation of knowledge workers get things done.

The Role

We're seeking a Senior Full-Stack Software Engineer 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 NYC or 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