Founding Engineer

superset}•San Francisco, CA

2d•Remote

About The Position

Athena is building the world's first AI tutor that teaches instead of waiting to be asked, believing every student deserves a tutor that adapts to them. The company aims to make AI the foundation of personalized education, providing access to guidance that is currently only affordable for a small percentage of students. Athena's first product has launched and is being used by students across the U.S. The company is seeking its first Founding Engineer to help build both the product and the technical foundation, defining Athena alongside the founder. This role involves debating product decisions, shaping the product roadmap, and establishing what AI-native learning should look like, going beyond just engineering execution. The company emphasizes product taste, good design, and student outcomes, believing that every engineering decision impacts how someone learns. They ship early and learn fast, using AI to raise the quality bar and amplify craftsmanship. The core challenge is building software that students trust for daily learning, encompassing personalization, memory, motivation, evaluation, and product design.

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.
The 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.
AI makes you faster, not less rigorous to accelerate development without compromising quality.
Want to spend the next several years building something from zero.

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.
Spend more time debating product decisions with the founder to turn ambitious ideas into software students genuinely love using.
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.