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. We deliver high-impact insights with unmatched quality across every stage of the product innovation lifecycle, empowering teams to act quickly and bring winning products to market with confidence.
About the Role
As a Staff Software Engineer on our Data Products 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.
Beyond your experience
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) — 100% employee premiums covered + 75% of dependent care
Unlimited PTO
Flexible, remote-first environment
Generous paid maternity and parental leave
$50/month WFH reimbursement
401(k) account
Based on previous experience and skill set, the starting salary range for this position is $170,000 - $210,000
You don't need to meet every qualification listed to apply; we value potential, curiosity, and diverse perspectives. At Highlight, we believe that innovation thrives when different experiences and ideas come together. We're committed to building an inclusive team where individuals of all backgrounds, including but not limited to race, age, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, national origin, religion, disability, veteran status, and more, feel empowered to contribute and grow.
If you're a critical thinker who's not afraid to challenge assumptions, we'd love to hear from you. We're a passionate, supportive team that puts Humans First, cares about each other, and yes, we take our tacos seriously.

Work arrangement
Yes