Founding Engineer

superset} Hive Community•San Francisco, CA

6h•Remote

About The Position

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 superset}, 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.

Requirements

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 Haves

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

Responsibilities

Define Athena as much as the founder does and help build both the product and the technical foundation at Athena.
Spend more time debating product decisions with the founder to turn ambitious ideas into software students genuinely love using (instead of implementing tickets).
Help define our engineering culture, shape the product roadmap, and establish what AI-native learning should look like.
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.
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.
Help decide what gets built, not just how it's built.