Architecture Lead, Ready to Build

Job description

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 over $175M 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 an accomplished Architecture Lead to build the design system that will power a new line of turn-key home plans for small- and mid-sized builders across the country. WHAT YOU'LL DO This role sits at the intersection of residential architecture, systems thinking, and product design. You're not here to design individual homes — you're here to design the system that produces them. That means developing a composable "kit of parts": catalogs of rooms, room groupings, and massings that function as reusable building blocks, assembled according to rules you define. You'll work closely with plan development specialists who bring deep knowledge of builder needs, code compliance, and market dynamics. Together, you'll translate that knowledge into structured, repeatable frameworks — design decisions encoded into software that can power homes at scale. You don't need to be a software engineer, but you should be excited about what it means for design logic to live inside a platform. This is genuinely new territory. You'll be defining a design discipline that doesn't fully exist yet, which means there will be ambiguity. The opportunity is to shape it. Expect to: - Develop catalogs of rooms, groupings, and massings designed as reusable components with defined relationships, constraints, and configuration logic - Establish the rules of assembly — what connects, what's constrained, what produces structurally sound and aesthetically coherent homes - Translate deep residential design intuition into structured, repeatable patterns that can be systematized - Partner with plan development leads to ensure the design system produces homes that are buildable, code-compliant, and market-ready - Contribute to standard details, design guidelines, and modeling best practices that support automation and scalability - Help define a new programming language, in effect, for how homes are created ABOUT YOU You love homes. You understand intuitively what makes a floor plan work — how rooms relate to each other, how proportion and flow create livability, what separates a house from a home. That intuition is real and hard-won, and it's what makes this role possible. But you're also drawn to the system, not just its output. You think naturally about how discrete elements combine into larger wholes, and you get genuine satisfaction from designing frameworks that others can build on. You're comfortable working at multiple scales simultaneously — from the detail of a single room to the logic that governs how an entire plan assembles. You have: - Experience in residential architecture with hands-on home design and construction knowledge - A systems design mindset — you're drawn to designing the rules, not just applying them - Comfort at the intersection of design and technology, and enthusiasm for encoding design decisions into software - Experience with parametric design tools and computational approaches - A licensed architect credential - Strong collaboration instincts — you can work across disciplines and translate between design intuition and technical constraints A major plus if you also bring: - Experience with catalog housing, plan libraries, or product-line residential design - Exposure to prefab, modular, or mass-customization housing approaches - Familiarity with BIM platforms and computational design tools like Grasshopper or Dynamo 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 flexible 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. Please note: we are seeing an uptick of fraudulent recruiting activity claiming to be associated with Higharc. All communication and outreach from our in-house team will come from an @higharc.com email address.