This role suits an engineer who enjoys working closely with customers, handling unstructured datasets, and building practical software solutions directly in front of the user. The Forward Deployed Engineer position is a remote role based out of New York City, New York, operating within a venture-backed startup environment.
Role Overview
Higharc is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer to join as one of the founding members of the new Forward Deployed team. The professional in this position will embed directly alongside a large production homebuilder to convert unstructured drawing sets and architectural plans into actionable, structured data. Responsibilities include technical discovery, pipeline development, and collaborating closely with internal cross-functional groups and external executive stakeholders.
Key Responsibilities
Embed with headquarters, regional, and division teams to run technical discovery, profile plan assets, assess data quality, and reverse-engineer drawing sets.
Build and ship searchable plan libraries, analytics dashboards, and agent-enabled natural-language search capabilities.
Tune and extend artificial intelligence capabilities to identify, categorize, and translate floorplans into data.
Write ETL scripts, build against internal APIs, and deliver working capabilities directly to users.
Build geometric similarity scoring and classification models to detect forked plans under different names.
Meet delivery milestones, coverage targets, data-field completeness, and quality assurance error thresholds while balancing tradeoffs.
Instrument and quantify catalog redundancy, dimensional spread, consolidation candidates, and purchasing leverage.
Partner with product management, technical leads, quality assurance, intake specialists, and client strategy while presenting progress to executive stakeholders.
Create repeatable tooling and reusable patterns from one-off scripts for future engagements.
Travel to client sites and company events up to 30 percent of the time.
Requirements
Five or more years of engineering experience, featuring significant time in customer-facing or deployed settings such as forward deployed engineering, solutions engineering, technical consulting, or professional services.
Strong hands-on data fluency including SQL, API scripting, notebook comfort, and direct data interrogation.
Prototyping experience to validate ideas quickly using tools like Cursor, Replit, or V0.dev.
Track record of building structured data models, taxonomies, or classification schemes and running systems on them in production.
Strong judgment regarding data quality, required decision accuracy, and associated costs.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills tailored for executive stakeholders.
Willingness to travel to client sites and company events up to 30 percent of the time.
Nice to Have
Background in residential construction, homebuilding, architecture, or architectural, engineering, and construction technology.
Experience with agent-based or natural-language search over structured data, retrieval-augmented generation systems, or large language model-powered analytics.
Exposure to geometric or spatial data such as computer-aided design, building information modeling, computer vision on drawings, similarity methods, and clustering methods.
Experience handling large, messy, enterprise-scale data migrations or ingestion programs.
Background in building a function from zero as an early hire into a new team, practice, or delivery model.
Skills and Tools
SQL
APIs
Notebooks
Cursor
Replit
V0.dev
Artificial Intelligence and Large Language Models
Salary and Benefits
Competitive salary with significant equity
Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage
Flexible paid time off and meaningful maternity and paternity leave for full-time United States-based employees
Short-term and long-term disability plans
401K plan
Home office setup stipend and ongoing learning and development support
About the Company
Higharc is a venture-backed startup founded in 2018 that is changing how new homes are designed and built. The organization has raised over 175 million dollars with support from venture capital firms and strategic industry leaders across construction, building products manufacturing, and distribution.
How to Apply
Candidates should apply directly on the official Higharc careers page, ensuring all communications originate from an official company email address.
