Founding Product Engineer

Emerge Career Partners•New York, NY

4d•Onsite

About The Position

We call this a Founding Engineer role—even three years in and with multiple contracts under our belt—for two reasons. First, you'll be our very first engineer, joining our co-founder, who's built the entire platform solo to date. Second, our growth is now outpacing our systems, and we can't keep up on maintenance alone. We're at a critical juncture: we can either hire someone to simply care for what exists, or we can bring on a talent who believes that, with the right blend of technology and hands-on practice, we can unify the workforce-development system and deliver second chances at true scale. We hope that can be you. This is not a traditional engineering job. You'll do high-impact technical work, but just as often you'll be on the phone with a student, writing documentation, debugging support issues, or figuring out how to turn a one-off solution into a repeatable system. You'll ship features, talk to users, and fix what's broken, whether that's in the product or in the process. You'll build things that matter, not just things that are asked for. This role blends engineering, product, support, and program operations. We're looking for someone who is energized by ownership, obsessed with user outcomes, and excited to work across domains to make things better. If you're the kind of person who wants to be hands-on with everything—students, code, strategy, and execution—you'll thrive here.

Requirements

Willing to relocate and work in-person in New York City
Passionate about working with underrepresented communities and tackling challenges related to poverty and inequity
Experience taking a project from 0 to 1. You might have led a project, been a founder previously, built an impressive side project, or been one of the first 10 employees at an early stage startup
Experience building AI-native products, or integrating AI into existing software
You love working with React and Typescript

Nice To Haves

Experience coaching individuals
Experience in ed-tech
Experience collaborating with operations or support teams
Experience working with operations or support teams

Responsibilities

Coaching students. You'll support students throughout their training journey—not just by building tools, but by directly engaging with them. This means texting, calling, and helping students one-on-one when needed. At the same time, you'll take what you learn from those interactions and turn it into scalable systems and smart automations. You'll be doing both engineering and non-engineering work to make sure students succeed and the product keeps improving.
Talking to students. Good founding engineers read feedback and iterate quickly. Great founding engineers have users they're friendly with, talk with them frequently, bounce ideas off them, and iterate with them when they ship new things.
Doing support . This is an engineering role with key program management responsibilities. You'll work directly with students every day. That requires patience, empathy, and a willingness to meet people where they are. You'll help investigate and resolve product issues, and you'll take ownership of making the product better through what you learn.
Documenting your work and its impact. Our work is complex, spans months, and involves multiple teams. Clear documentation and communication are critical. You'll be responsible for creating awareness when a change impacts operations, and for helping others understand how features affect different parts of training and service delivery. Precision matters.
Owning products and features end to end . You won't just take tickets. You'll originate ideas based on user conversations, your own instincts, and our larger strategy. You'll test MVPs in production, iterate based on real feedback, and stay accountable to the long-term success of your work. We build in React and TypeScript. If you like shipping for the sake of it, this role isn't for you. If you like shipping with purpose and ownership, you'll love it here.
Implementing AI features and operational workflows . This is last for a reason. We don't jump to automation. We do things manually first to fully understand the problem—then we build. If you care about applying AI meaningfully, not just for hype, this is the right place.