Staff Software Engineer, Data Products

Highlight is the definitive product intelligence platform enabling brands to create products people love. Powered by a proprietary community, seamless logistics, expert research methodologies, and AI-driven analytics, Highlight’s platform is purpose-built for modern physical product teams and trusted by leading brands, top retailers, and emerging innovators alike. The Highlight platform delivers high-impact insights with unmatched quality across every stage of the product innovation lifecycle—from early ideas and prototypes to in-market renovation—empowering teams to act quickly and bring winning products to market with confidence.

About the role

As a Staff Software Engineer on our development team, you'll own the architecture and execution of data-intensive systems that power insights for our customers. You'll balance hands-on technical leadership with mentorship, setting the technical bar for how we build at scale while shipping features that directly impact product strategy and customer value. Success means delivering performant, maintainable systems while growing the engineering team's capabilities and understanding of complex data challenges.

Working at Highlight

At Highlight, you’ll be joining a high-velocity, high-ownership culture that measures itself by our positive impact on our customers and the world (not story points). To help make our mission a reality, you’ll:

• Use your technical expertise and good judgment to translate ideas, wireframes, and detailed designs into data-intensive web applications that deliver value for our customers
• Use agentic loops throughout your development process to accelerate value delivery
• Use architecture and code reviews to coach, mentor, and raise the bar for both end-user products and software systems
• Triage, investigate, and resolve complex issues involving distributed systems and third-party providers
• Understand and directly advance Highlight’s mission

What We're Looking For

Highlight was founded to make the hardest parts of physical product testing easy. Even if you’re new to the space, we’d love to see your own experience turning rough ideas into polished, usable data products. That may include:

• 5+ years of experience building data-intensive online applications
• Familiarity with ETL and/or RAG design and development
• Proficiency in multiple technologies across our software stack (React, TypeScript, Next.JS, ai-sdk, PostgreSQL, and C#/.NET)
• Familiarity with design and prototyping tools like Figma and v0
• Bonus points for experience operating CI/CD pipelines (we use Github Actions, Terraform, and helm), production systems (AWS, EKS) or observability platforms (Grafana/OTel) aligned with our stack.

We’re building a culture that will serve Highlight far beyond our current, early stage, and all of us have a big part to play. To that end, we prize humans who are:

• Owners. You’ll take initiative, deliver results, and inspire the people around you to do the same.
• Impact-driven. You’ll understand your users’ needs and take ownership in delivering value on their behalf
• Great teammates. You’ll share our team’s commitment to learning and growth and thrive in collaboration with the humans around you
• Curious. You’ll go the extra mile to understand the “why” behind your work, seeing ambiguity and open questions as opportunities to learn and overdeliver

Benefits

• Health insurance (medical, dental, vision) with 100% of employee premiums covered
• Unlimited PTO
• Flexible, remote WFH culture
• Generous paid maternity & parental leave
• 401k account
• $50/month WFH reimbursement
• Based on previous experience and skillset, the starting salary range for this position is $170,000 - $210,000