Founding Engineer

Location: Remote or San Francisco Bay Area (Preferred)

Format: Full-time

The Mission

Athena is building the world's first AI tutor that teaches instead of waiting to be asked.

We believe every student deserves a tutor that adapts to them, not the other way around. AI will become the foundation of personalized education, giving every student access to the kind of guidance that today only a small percentage of students can afford.

Today's AI helps students find answers. Athena helps students learn. Our vision is a world where every student has access to a tutor that understands how each student learns. Athena notices when they're struggling. It knows when to encourage, when to challenge, and when to explain differently. That's the future we're building.

We've already launched our first product and are working closely with students across the U.S. The biggest lesson so far is simple: students don't want another chatbot or another video. They want something that understands where they are, guides them toward what's next, keeps them motivated, and makes learning genuinely enjoyable.

All-in-one- education wasn't designed around the student. It's a collection of disconnected tools- students bounce between YouTube, ChatGPT, practice platforms, tutoring services, and static materials, stitching together their own learning experience. The best YouTube videos still teach everyone the same way. AI chatbots wait for students to ask the right questions. The best tutors don't. Students need software that understands what they know, what they don't know, and what should happen next.

Athena combines frontier AI with thoughtful product design, and learning science to create a tutor that's always available, deeply personalized, and genuinely enjoyable to learn with. We are an incubated company out of super{set}, a San Francisco venture studio that conceives, funds, and builds AI-native companies from formation through scale.

Athena is founded by Kize, whose educational content has reached more than 250,000 learners. The product is already in students' hands, and we're now building the platform that can scale that experience far beyond one creator.

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.

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