Research Intern - Special Projects

About Us

Higharc is a VC-backed startup that is changing how new homes are designed and built. Join a founding team who’ve shipped products for Autodesk, Electronic Arts, Nike, and Apple. We have raised a total of $83M with support from top-notch venture capital firms and more than 18 strategic investors—industry leaders in construction, building products manufacturing, and distribution.

Higharc is seeking Research Interns (PhD) to join our Special Projects team. You'll work at the frontier of vision-language models, LLMs, and agentic systems applied to a genuinely hard problem: teaching AI to understand a home's structured design state and propose valid edits from natural-language instructions. Each intern owns a distinct research thread, but all three projects share a common goal — enabling workflows like editing layouts, designing roofs, and adding architectural elements without requiring users to manually draw every entity.

What You'll Do

Expect to:

• Build data pipelines that extract and curate structured datasets from Higharc's existing design data

• Design and implement models (or adapt existing ones) for vision-language understanding, structured output generation, and agentic editing of home designs

• Implement and execute training, fine-tuning, and post-training pipelines, including preference optimization and RLHF-style methods

• Develop evaluation suites and error taxonomies for targeted tasks, including layout validity, instruction-following accuracy, and edit correctness

• Run rigorous ablations and scaling experiments; track results and maintain reproducibility and research hygiene

• Prototype product-facing integrations that demonstrate end-to-end AI-assisted design workflows

• Document findings and deliver results through technical reports, demos, and a publication-track draft

About You

You bring a research-oriented mindset, work well with a close-knit technical team, and operate with genuine autonomy. You take ownership of your thread from problem formulation through submission-ready output.

You have:

• Active enrollment in a PhD program in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field at a U.S. institution

• Strong Python skills and hands-on experience building deep learning training workflows (PyTorch preferred)

• Solid understanding of at least two of: computer vision, transformers, LLMs, representation learning, and ML experimentation practices

• Demonstrated research ability through publications, preprints, open-source research code, or equivalent evidence of research impact

• Comfort working in research/engineering stacks such as Roboflow, Modal, and W&B

A plus if you also bring:

• Experience with vision-language models, multimodal foundation models, or grounded document understanding

• Experience building or fine-tuning agentic LLM systems that reason over structured state and produce structured edits

• Familiarity with post-training techniques: RLHF, DPO, or other preference optimization methods

• Experience with multi-GPU training and large-scale experimentation (Modal or similar)

• Familiarity with AEC data and workflows, including CAD/BIM concepts, floor-plan understanding, or domain-specific labeling

Working at Higharc

Higharc has been remote first since our founding in 2018. We offer flexible hours so you can do your best work without missing out on life. Higharc offers competitive salaries with significant equity, in a fast-growing, well-funded company.

Personal healthiness is an important value for us- we provide comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage, with unlimited PTO, and meaningful maternity/paternity leave to all U.S based employees that are full-time. You'll also have access to other big-company benefits such like short and long-term disability plans and a 401K. Haven't worked remotely before? We provide a stipend to create the ideal home office.