Founding Engineer

Location: Remote or San Francisco Bay Area (Preferred)

Format: Full-time

The Role

We're looking for our first Founding Engineer who will define Athena as much as the founder does and help build both the product and the technical foundation at Athena.

You'll spend more time debating product decisions with the founder to turn ambitious ideas into software students genuinely love using (instead of implementing tickets). You'll help define our engineering culture, shape the product roadmap, and establish what AI-native learning should look like.

This role goes well beyond engineering execution. Great education products sit at the intersection of engineering, product, design, psychology, and learning science. Every engineering decision changes how someone learns.

We're looking for someone who wants to build a great company, not just write code.

How We Build

We care as much about how we build as what we build.

• Product taste and good design matters. We believe great design keeps students engaged. We obsess over the moments most teams ignore:
• the pacing of an explanation, the moment encouragement appears, the friction between opening the app and making progress. We want Athena to feel less like educational software and more like a product students genuinely look forward to using. If Athena feels like "another AI app," we've failed.
• Students' outcomes win every argument. Every decision starts with one question: Does this genuinely help students learn?
• Ship early and learn fast. We believe real student behavior is more valuable than internal debate. We ship, observe, learn, and iterate relentlessly.
• AI should raise the quality bar. We use AI throughout our development process to move faster, but never to lower our standards. AI should amplify craftsmanship, not replace it.

Why This Role Matters

The hard problem is building software students trust enough to learn with every day. That means solving personalization, memory, motivation, evaluation, and product design at once.

As Athena's first Founding Engineer, you'll help define what AI-native education looks like. You'll influence not only the architecture, but also the product, the culture, and the standards we build around.

The architectural decisions you make in year one may still shape Athena a decade from now.
What You'll Own

You'll own the following across both product and engineering:

• How Athena remembers every learner and how it decides when to intervene
• How we measure whether learning actually happened
• How AI explanations improve over time
• The systems that let us ship every week without accumulating technical debt
• AI-powered tutoring and personalized learning experiences
• At a skill level:
• Full-stack product development across frontend, backend, AI systems, and infrastructure
• Production AI systems combining reasoning, retrieval, evaluation, and user feedback
• Product quality, performance, and user experience
• Internal tooling and infrastructure that enable rapid iteration

This role spans the entire stack. One week you may be designing a new tutoring experience. The next you may be improving AI evaluation systems, refining onboarding, optimizing infrastructure, or shipping features inspired directly by student feedback.

You'll help decide what gets built, not just how it's built.
What Success Looks Like

During your first 6 to 9 months, your focus will be on three priorities.

Students voluntarily return every week: Build the next versions of Athena and the learning experiences that students return to because they genuinely help them make progress.Engineering velocity increases rather than slows: Establish scalable architecture, engineering standards, and systems that allow the company to move quickly without sacrificing quality.Partner closely with the founder on product direction, architecture, hiring, and engineering culture: As one of the earliest employees, you'll help shape not only the product, but how Athena operates.
What You Bring
Must Have

• Experience building and shipping production software across multiple layers of the stack
• You've built full products real customers depend on
• Strong product instincts and engineering judgment - You instinctively know when something feels unfinished
• Exceptional attention to user experience and product quality - You care about details most people never notice
• The ability to turn ambiguous ideas into polished, intuitive products
• Experience talking directly with users and incorporating feedback into product decisions - You regularly sync with users because product intuition isn't built from dashboards
• A track record of operating independently in early-stage or fast-moving environments
• AI makes you faster, not less rigorous to accelerate development without compromising quality
• You want to spend the next several years building something from zero

We're less interested in your exact technology stack than your judgment, curiosity, and ability to build products people genuinely love.
Nice to Have

• Experience as an early engineer or founder
• Experience building consumer products
• Experience building AI-native products
• Experience with LLMs, agents, retrieval systems, evaluation frameworks, or AI infrastructure
• Passion for education and helping people learn

This role probably isn't for you if

• You prefer clear requirements over ambiguous problems
• You want someone else deciding what to build
• You're optimizing for elegant architecture instead of student outcomes
• You see engineering as separate from product

What You Get

• A defining role as the first engineer at an AI-native education company
• Direct partnership with the founder on product and technical strategy
• Competitive salary and meaningful equity
• Ownership over both technical and product direction from day one
• The opportunity to help define the future of personalized education

How to Apply

Please include:

• Your résumé or LinkedIn profile
• Show us something you've built that people actually use. We'd rather explore one product deeply than skim ten GitHub repositories.
• A few sentences about why Athena's mission resonates with you.

We're looking for someone who wants to invent how millions of students learn with AI and not to implement a roadmap. If that excites you more than the title on your business card, we'd love to meet you.