Athena
Founding Engineer
RemoteUnited States only· Prefers United States
- Role
- Fullstack
- Employment
- Full-time
- Company size
- Startup
Salary not disclosed
Check eligibility
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The listing prefers candidates in United States.
No BS summary
First founding engineer for a U.S.-remote AI education startup, with San Francisco Bay Area preferred. Needs someone who has shipped full products across the stack, can work independently in ambiguity, and wants to own product, architecture, AI systems, and engineering culture from zero.
Core skills
LLMsRetrieval systemsAI evaluation systems
Optional skills
AgentsEvaluation frameworksAI infrastructure
What you'll do
- Define Athena as much as the founder does and help build both the product and the technical foundation at Athena.
- Debate product decisions with the founder to turn ambitious ideas into software students genuinely love using.
- Help define engineering culture, shape the product roadmap, and establish what AI-native learning should look like.
- Design learning experiences students genuinely enjoy using.
- Help every student make measurable progress through personalized, AI-powered tutoring.
- Define how Athena remembers what students know and decides what they should learn next.
- Build the systems that measure whether students are actually learning and not just completing exercises.
- Establish the engineering architecture, tooling, and standards that allow Athena to move quickly as it scales.
- Partner with the founder on product direction, technical strategy, and building the engineering team.
- Work across full-stack product development spanning frontend, backend, AI systems, and infrastructure.
- Work on production AI systems that combine reasoning, retrieval, evaluation, and continuous improvement from student interactions.
- Work on product quality, performance, and user experience.
- Work on engineering architecture, developer tooling, and infrastructure that enable rapid, high-quality iteration.
- Design new learning experiences or refine how Athena adapts to an individual student.
- Improve AI evaluation systems, optimize infrastructure, strengthen engineering foundations, or ship features inspired directly by student feedback.
- Build the next versions of Athena and the learning experiences that students return to because they genuinely help them make progress.
- 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.
- Help shape not only the product, but how Athena operates.
What they require
- 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, accelerating development without compromising quality.
- You want to spend the next several years building something from zero.
- Judgment, curiosity, and ability to build products people genuinely love.
- Preferred: Experience as an early engineer or founder.
- Preferred: Experience building consumer products.
- Preferred: Experience building AI-native products.
- Preferred: Passion for education and helping people learn.
- This role probably isn't for you if you prefer clear requirements over ambiguous problems.
- This role probably isn't for you if you want someone else deciding what to build.
- This role probably isn't for you if you're optimizing for elegant architecture instead of student outcomes.
- This role probably isn't for you if you see engineering as separate from product.
- Please include your résumé or LinkedIn profile.
- Show something you've built that people actually use.
- Include a few sentences about why Athena's mission resonates with you.
Benefits
- 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.
Athena is building an AI tutor that teaches proactively, adapts to each student, and combines frontier AI, product design, and learning science for personalized education.
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