Highlight's Engineering Philosophy

Highlight’s mission to build better products for people and the planet starts at home. If you’re in the business of revolutionizing product development for companies from their early stages to the Fortune 100, you’re going to need a remarkable product of your own—and a remarkable team to build it.

Confident iteration and ambition aren’t just for our customers. They’re also key ingredients in the culture and products we’re building ourselves. With rapid growth comes rapid team expansion and the challenge of maintaining an exceptional, aligned team.

Enter our Engineering Philosophy.

Why an Engineering Philosophy? 

Software development is a delicate balance between competing priorities.

• performance and extensibility
• correctness and iteration speed
• simplicity and completeness
• security and usability

And the most crucial of all: between the shared mental model needed to build software in a team setting and the paralysis of tight coupling. Effective collaboration requires a common framework for making decisions, resolving tensions, and ensuring coherence across our work.

A strong engineering philosophy should:

• guide our approach to day-to-day tasks
• improve internal alignment
• support decision-making in ambiguous or uncertain scenarios
• help attract amazing teammates to our cause
• declare our values and intentions to the world

By establishing a philosophy, we create clarity—not just for how we build, but for why we build the way we do.

Highlight’s Engineering Philosophy

Philosophies falter when they offer specific prescriptions, and ours doesn’t try. It simply codifies five of the guiding principles we believe to be true of any excellent engineering team and supports us in applying them.

We ship to learn

Breakthroughs emerge from a willingness to fail fast and iterate. We’re building value, not just software, and it’s OK if we don’t yet know where that value will begin. If something doesn’t work, we embrace the lesson and move forward. After all, experimentation is in our DNA.

We believe in our work

Our customers and teammates rely on us to keep our applications running smoothly and to continuously improve them. If we’re not confident in the code we ship, we risk losing the trust of others—and worse, our own. Cutting corners might be faster in the short term, but real success comes from delivering work we can stand behind.

We take ownership

In a fully remote workplace, autonomy is a feature, not a bug. We trust our teammates to manage their time, their work, and their responsibilities in a way that balances productivity with personal well-being. With that freedom comes accountability: we take ownership of our contributions and follow through on commitments.

We respect that life happens outside of work, but we also recognize that each of us plays a vital role in the team’s success.

We collaborate respectfully

Great teams are built on trust, psychological safety, and mutual respect. We communicate openly, assume good intent, and challenge ideas—not people. We embrace diverse perspectives, recognizing that different experiences make our team stronger.

Collaboration thrives when everyone feels valued, heard, and empowered to bring their best thinking to the table.

We invest in growth

Software development is a team sport. We support each other’s professional and personal development by seeking out opportunities to learn, mentor, and improve. When any of us level up, the entire team benefits, and investments in each other make our work, our team, and the company that much stronger.

Wrap-up

That’s it: five short bullets that make Highlight Engineering an exceptional place to work today—and that we’re confident will sustain our growth in the years to come. Highlightees know better than most how, and how often, products fail—and whether we’re tapping into automation, data integration, or a deep background in product research, we’re determined to make good on our mission and build better products for all.

Sound good? We'd love for you to join us!