Founding Engineer

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

• Product taste and good design matter. 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.

What You'll Own

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

• Designing learning experiences students genuinely enjoy using
• Helping every student make measurable progress through personalized, AI-powered tutoring
• Defining how Athena remembers what students know and decides what they should learn next
• Building the systems that measure whether students are actually learning and not just completing exercises
• Establishing the engineering architecture, tooling, and standards that allow Athena to move quickly as we scale
• Partnering with the founder on product direction, technical strategy, and building the engineering team

At a skill level, you'll work across:

• Full-stack product development spanning frontend, backend, AI systems, and infrastructure
• Production AI systems that combine reasoning, retrieval, evaluation, and continuous improvement from student interactions
• Product quality, performance, and user experience
• Engineering architecture, developer tooling, and infrastructure that enable rapid, high-quality iteration

This role spans the entire stack. One week you may be designing a new learning experience or refining how Athena adapts to an individual student. The next week, you may be improving AI evaluation systems, optimizing infrastructure, strengthening engineering foundations, or shipping features inspired directly by student feedback.