Research Intern, Special Projects
Role summary
Higharc, a VC-backed startup revolutionizing home design and construction, seeks PhD Research Interns for its Special Projects team. Interns will focus on applying vision-language models, LLMs, and agentic systems to AI-driven home design. Key responsibilities include building data pipelines, designing and implementing AI models, executing training and fine-tuning processes, developing evaluation metrics, and prototyping product integrations. The ideal candidate possesses strong Python and deep learning skills, a solid understanding of ML concepts, and demonstrated research ability. Experience with specific AI models and AEC data is a plus. This is a remote, full-time internship opportunity.
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.