About the role
You will build our software product end to end - the application learners live in, the backend that serves unique AI-enabled learning experiences at scale, and the infrastructure underneath both. You'll make key architecture and implementation decisions early enough that they'll still matter years from now.
The product is unusual in a specific way: every learner's experience is different, generated and adapted for them, and delivered through long-running relationships rather than stateless sessions. Serving that well is a real systems problem - state and memory over months, streaming AI interactions that feel instant, content pipelines with verification stages, and the observability to know what thousands of concurrent learner sessions are actually doing.
What you will do
- Build the product end to end: frontend experiences, backend services, data layer, and deployment - you'll touch all of it, and own large pieces outright
- Make foundational architecture decisions - and revisit them honestly as reality reports back
- Build the serving layer for AI-driven experiences: streaming responses, session and memory state, background generation and verification jobs, graceful degradation when models misbehave
- Set the engineering bar: testing, CI, observability, and the pragmatism to know which corners are safe to cut at our stage and which never are
- Ship daily alongside a founding team that includes Andrew, with direct exposure to every product decision
What you bring
- AI-native: you default to AI-assisted coding and building automations in everything you do, and you stay current with the newest AI engineering practices because you can't help it
- 4+ years building and shipping production web applications end to end
- Strong TypeScript/JavaScript and modern web frameworks (React/Next.js or similar), plus solid backend engineering (Node or Python), API design, and SQL
- Experience owning production systems: deployment, monitoring, incident response, performance - you've been paged and made the pager quieter
- Experience integrating LLM APIs into products, including streaming, and an informed view of what makes AI products feel great or terrible
- Judgment: you can make an architecture call under uncertainty, state your reasoning in a paragraph, and change your mind when evidence arrives
Nice to have
- Early-stage startup experience - you've been one of the first engineers somewhere and know what that demands
- Real-time or voice interaction experience (WebSockets, WebRTC, audio pipelines)
- Data-pipeline or event-analytics experience
- Consumer-product sensibility: you sweat interaction details users can't name but always feel
What success looks like
In your first 30 days, you will have shipped meaningful product improvements to production and formed a view of where the architecture will bend before it breaks.
In your first 6 months, the platform will be one you're proud of - serving personalized learning experiences reliably, instrumented so the team learns from every session, and structured so a growing team can build on it without asking you first.
