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About the Role
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. We are 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. This role goes well beyond engineering execution, as 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.
Responsibilities
- Debate product decisions with the founder to turn ambitious ideas into software students genuinely love using.
- Help define our engineering culture.
- Shape the product roadmap.
- Establish what AI-native learning should look like.
- Own how Athena remembers every learner and how it decides when to intervene.
- Own how we measure whether learning actually happened.
- Own how AI explanations improve over time.
- Own the systems that let us ship every week without accumulating technical debt.
- Own AI-powered tutoring and personalized learning experiences.
- Perform full-stack product development across frontend, backend, AI systems, and infrastructure.
- Develop production AI systems combining reasoning, retrieval, evaluation, and user feedback.
- Ensure product quality, performance, and user experience.
- Build internal tooling and infrastructure that enable rapid iteration.
- Decide what gets built, not just how it's built.
Requirements
- Experience building and shipping production software across multiple layers of the stack.
- Have built full products real customers depend on.
- Strong product instincts and engineering judgment.
- Exceptional attention to user experience and product quality.
- Ability to turn ambiguous ideas into polished, intuitive products.
- Experience talking directly with users and incorporating feedback into product decisions.
- A track record of operating independently in early-stage or fast-moving environments.
- Use AI to accelerate development without compromising quality.
- Desire to spend the next several years building something from zero.
- Passion for education and helping people learn.
Skills
- Full-stack product development
- Frontend development
- Backend development
- AI systems development
- Infrastructure development
- Production AI systems
- Reasoning
- Retrieval
- Evaluation
- User feedback integration
- Product quality
- Performance optimization
- User experience enhancement
- Internal tooling
- Infrastructure for rapid iteration
- LLMs
- Agents
- Retrieval systems
- Evaluation frameworks
- AI infrastructure
Location
- Remote
- San Francisco Bay Area
Work Type
- Full-time
Experience Level
- Founding Engineer
- Early engineer
- Founder
Salary/Compensations
- Competitive salary
- Meaningful equity
Benefits
- Defining role as the first engineer at an AI-native education company
- Direct partnership with the founder on product and technical strategy
- Ownership over both technical and product direction from day one
- Opportunity to help define the future of personalized education
About the Company
- Athena is building the world's first AI tutor that teaches instead of waiting to be asked.
- Our vision is a world where every student has access to a tutor that understands how each student learns.
- 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.
- We care as much about how we build as what we build.
- Product taste and good design matters.
- Students’ outcomes win every argument.
- Ship early and learn fast.
- AI should raise the quality bar.