Founding Product Engineer
About The Position
Emerge Career's mission is to break the cycle of poverty and incarceration by creating pathways to second chances through an all-in-one platform embedded within the criminal justice system. The platform recruits, trains, and places justice-impacted individuals into careers. The company aims to become a unified, tech-powered workforce development system. Emerge Career has demonstrated significantly higher graduation and employment rates compared to traditional job centers, with alumni earning substantially more. The founders previously co-founded Ameelio, a successful tech nonprofit in the prison communication space. Emerge Career addresses recidivism and labor shortages by providing effective workforce development within prisons, offering better wages and skills for long-term employment. This Founding Engineer role is crucial for scaling the platform, moving beyond maintenance to actively improving systems and expanding reach. The role involves high-impact technical work alongside direct student engagement, documentation, support, and system development. It requires a blend of engineering, product management, support, and program operations, with a focus on ownership, user outcomes, and cross-domain collaboration.
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 (e.g., led a project, was a founder, built a significant side project, or was an early employee at a startup).
- Experience building AI-native products or integrating AI into existing software.
- Experience working with React and Typescript.
Nice To Haves
- Experience coaching individuals.
- Experience in ed-tech.
- Experience collaborating with operations or support teams.
Responsibilities
- Coach students throughout their training journey, including direct engagement via text and calls, and one-on-one assistance.
- Translate learnings from student interactions into scalable systems and automations.
- Engage frequently with users to gather feedback, bounce ideas, and iterate on new features.
- Investigate and resolve product issues, taking ownership of product improvements based on learnings.
- Create documentation to ensure awareness of operational changes and to help others understand feature impacts.
- Originate product and feature ideas based on user conversations, intuition, and company strategy.
- Test MVPs in production, iterate based on feedback, and ensure accountability for long-term success.
- Implement AI features after understanding the problem through manual processes.
- Build and maintain the platform using React and TypeScript.
Benefits
- Paid Work Trial (2-5 days) with travel expenses covered.
- Compensation during the paid work trial ($500 per day).
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Entry Level
Education Level
No Education Listed
