Senior SWE, Backend

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 hiring a Senior Backend Software Engineer to own critical backend infrastructure: the systems behind team management, permissions, LLM efficiency, and integration-driven workflows. You’ll scale our systems with a strong emphasis on performance, reliability, and seamless user experience.

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

• Build backend systems that support product growth, including multi-tenant foundations, permissions, and internal/admin tooling

• Design and operate asynchronous processing systems for background workloads and workflow orchestration

• Improve system performance and cost through practical optimizations (caching, batching, efficient data access patterns)

• Build secure, extensible integration infrastructure (authentication, APIs, third-party connectors)

• Raise the bar on backend engineering quality through observability, testing, incident readiness, and operational best practices

• Collaborate cross-functionally to ship features end-to-end while designing backend systems that are durable, extensible, and easy to iterate on

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 is ideal for someone who enjoys building scalable systems, improving observability, and reducing cost through practical optimizations like caching, batching, rollups, and queue-based processing. They’ll partner closely with product and the ML team to ensure Highlight remains reliable and performant as usage scales.

You are a good fit if you have:

• 5+ years of experience at a fast-moving startup with experience shipping production backend systems

• Comfort owning systems end-to-end: from architecture and implementation to deployment, monitoring, and debugging

• Experience building reliable distributed systems (APIs, databases, async jobs, queues, pipelines)

• Experience building real-time systems (WebSockets, pub/sub, event fanout) with low-latency and reliability at scale

• Experience building enterprise-ready multi-tenant systems, including team management, roles/permissions, and admin/internal tooling

• Familiarity with LLM product infrastructure patterns (caching, batching, evals, integrations) is a plus

• 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