Software Engineer, Applied AI Research

About Hightouch

Hightouch is an Agentic Marketing Platform powered by the industry-leading Composable CDP. With complete brand context, customer data, and performance history in one place, every marketer finally has the power to build and ship end-to-end campaigns themselves. Teams move faster, stay on brand, and get AI marketing that actually works.

Founded in 2019 and headquartered in San Francisco, Hightouch enables marketing teams to analyze performance, brainstorm ideas, and generate creative at a speed and quality that wasn't previously possible.

Named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Customer Data Platforms, Hightouch is trusted by leading enterprises like Domino's, Spotify, Aritzia, Cars.com, Ramp, and PetSmart.

At Hightouch, our mission is to help our customers leverage data and AI to grow their businesses. The team is ambitious, impact-driven, efficient — and we believe humility, kindness, and compassion are essential to our success. If you're energized by velocity, obsessed with raising the bar, and want to build alongside people who care deeply about each other and our customers, we'd love to meet you.

About the Role

We’re looking to add applied AI research engineers to the team. The ideal candidate will have strong probabilistic and quantitative thinking, the ability to be highly creative and experimental with LLM applications, and ground their work in potential customer and product applications.

Our applied research team focuses on finding new and innovative techniques to improve the frontier of what is possible in agentic AI marketing applications, with a particular focus on image and video. We focus less on theory or writing research papers, and more on experimenting, prototyping, and exploring new methods for applying generative AI to help our customers grow their companies.

Example workstreams include:

• Quickly iterating and developing proofs of concept (POCs) to explore the maximum potential of integrating AI into data and marketing workflows
• Design and develop evaluation and improvement systems that can make advancements autonomously
• Expanding the frontier of what is feasible with AI generated video (e.g. making generated humans maximally realistic)
• Experiment with different approaches for generating brand assets that stay aligned to a particular company’s look and feel

We're seeking talented, intellectually curious, and motivated individuals interested in exploring the forefront of AI. While no prior experience with LLMs and AI is required, strong technical skills, particularly in backend architecture or probabilistic systems, and product intuition are essential for understanding and executing these projects from start to finish.

This is a senior role, but we focus on impact and potential for growth more than years of experience. The salary range for this position is $180,000 - $400,000 USD per year, which is location independent in accordance with our remote-first policy.

Interview Process

Our interview process focuses on evaluating fit for the most important dimensions of the role: product sense and creativity with LLMs, ability to architect backend systems, and alignment with Hightouch’s values. Notably, we don’t do any programming interviews as we believe they are low signal to noise and aren’t a good evaluation mechanism.

• Recruiter Screen [30m]: Introductory call with our recruiting team to get to know each other and see if the role could be a good mutual fit.
• System Design Screen [60m]: Designing a data processing or machine learning feature end-to-end (depending on background).
• Hiring Manager Interview [30m]: Chat with hiring manager about past experiences and future operating preferences to assess fit on company values and operating principles.
• Agent Building Systems Interview [75m]: Work with the interviewer to architect an agentic system at a conceptual level. The problem will be at a pretty high level - and have both product and customer requirements as well as technical.