AI continues to evolve at a breakneck pace, making continuous learning a necessity for those in the industry. Whether you’re an established AI professional or just starting, leveling up your skills can open doors to new opportunities and keep you competitive in the job market while seeking a role that can help you continue to grow.
As the field progresses, mastering the foundational principles of AI — such as machine learning algorithms, neural networks and data preprocessing — remains critical. But to truly excel, professionals need to go beyond the basics and stay up to date with the tech by pursuing learning opportunities and engaging in projects that put theory into practice while staying grounded in the fundamentals of software development.
At Superhuman, a holistic understanding of machine learning and software engineering sets prospective team members apart, Senior Engineering Manager Sachin Hegde told Built In San Francisco.
“We expect you to be comfortable with the full stack, and to be able to understand and improve upon system design. We also look for strong opinions and a point of view, and expect you to challenge the status quo and push for constant learning and improvement,” he explained. “A high degree of ownership comes with significant responsibility, so we expect that our engineers rise up to the challenge when issues arise and in doing so uphold our high quality bar.”
For skilled and confident engineers looking for new opportunities, Hegde shared an inside look into Superhuman’s AI efforts.
Superhuman is an email platform designed to enhance productivity with features like AI-powered tools, advanced filtering and a sleek user interface, offering users a faster and more efficient email experience.
What is Superhuman’s relationship with AI? What makes this relationship unique?
At Superhuman, our relationship with AI is deeply embedded into our product, helping deliver the fastest and most delightful email experience in the world. We integrate AI in a way that enhances the user’s workflow seamlessly, from predicting email responses to providing smart shortcuts and prioritizations that reflect how our users work.
Speed is a key focus for us, and we go to great lengths to ensure low-latency experiences. Every interaction with Superhuman feels instant, with our AI often working behind the scenes to keep performance fast and fluid when users actually engage with the product. The value lies in the precision and attention to detail that AI brings to Superhuman — every interaction is optimized, making it faster, smarter and more intuitive for users to get through their inbox.
What sets us apart is our commitment to leveraging the best AI models in the world while ensuring that the AI feels deeply personal and tuned to each individual. By maintaining lightning-fast response times, we not only make email management efficient but also uniquely crafted for those who want a beautiful, high-performance tool to power their communication.
“What sets us apart is our commitment to leveraging the best AI models in the world while ensuring that the AI feels deeply personal and tuned to each individual.”
Tell the story of how AI has evolved at Superhuman.
Before we integrated AI, Superhuman users had to manage their inboxes manually — sorting, responding, summarizing and scheduling were time-consuming tasks that required attention. Email workflows were efficient but heavily reliant on user input for every detail.
As AI evolved at Superhuman, we introduced features that transformed every part of the email journey. With “Write with AI,” users could generate drafts quickly, and “Auto Summarize” allowed them to get concise overviews of long emails. “Instant Reply” made generating fast, thoughtful responses effortless, while “Ask AI” could handle questions about your emails, making it easier to find information in your inbox.
Now, we’re tackling AI-powered scheduling, to make finding time and creating events smoother than ever. Looking ahead, our product team is most excited about prioritizing the inbox — helping users categorize emails, surface the most important messages and filter out the noise. AI is poised to make every interaction with Superhuman more personalized, intuitive and faster than ever before.
What career development opportunities does Superhuman offer to help an employee advance their career in AI?
We run a small but mighty AI team of about 10 engineers in all, and we’re all about shipping fast and iterating even faster.
Engineers here have extremely high agency to influence the product in a meaningful way. They’re involved right from prioritization, ideation and planning all the way through to execution, shipping and maintenance.
Most recently, our team took up the challenge of building a RAG-based chatbot that allows for natural-language email and calendar search, with deeper agentic workflows planned in the near future. With a concerted effort from the entire AI team, we shipped with entirely new infrastructure in less than two months.
