Software Engineer, Applied AI Research

<div class="content-intro"><h2>About Hightouch</h2> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p></div><h2><strong>About the Role</strong></h2> <p>We’re looking to add&nbsp;<strong>applied AI research engineers</strong>&nbsp;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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>Example workstreams include:</p> <ul> <li>Quickly iterating and developing proofs of concept (POCs) to explore the maximum potential of integrating AI into data and marketing workflows</li> <li>Design and develop evaluation and improvement systems that can make advancements autonomously</li> <li>Expanding the frontier of what is feasible with AI generated video (e.g. making generated humans maximally realistic)</li> <li>Experiment with different approaches for generating brand assets that stay aligned to a particular company’s look and feel</li> </ul> <p>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