Visiting Engineer: Research Coach
About The Position
AI is making it trivially easy for students to skip the hard parts of research. This role is to build an AI research coach for high school students that teaches the research process through guided coaching — not ghostwriting — so students come out stronger thinkers, not just better at hiding AI use. What you'll build: A guided workflow for question refinement, source review, note-taking, drafting support, and rubric-aware feedback. Citation verification grounded in real scholarly sources rather than generic model claims. A transparent authorship log that distinguishes student-written work from AI scaffolding or suggestions. Optional sandboxed experimentation or code execution where computational work is part of the research process. What you'll do: Own the user journey from early research question to draft refinement and evidence review. Design guardrails that enforce coaching behavior instead of drifting into ghostwriting. Build multi-step agentic workflows with strong traceability, citation grounding, and failure handling. Talk to students, parents, or educators to learn where the process helps versus harms. Work with AI Fund's build team on product positioning, pedagogy, and technical tradeoffs.
Requirements
- Strong full-stack engineering ability and real hands-on experience shipping multi-step GenAI systems.
- Experience with citation grounding, retrieval, agent orchestration, evals, or developer-tool style workflows.
- Product judgment around trust, educational integrity, and how much help a student should receive.
- A bias toward clear UX for complex workflows rather than impressive but brittle demos.
- You know how to use AI coding assistants and modern AI tools to increase speed without surrendering product judgment.
- US work authorization.
- We are unable to sponsor visas for this role.
Nice To Haves
- Edtech experience or a personal connection to research education.
- Experience building code sandboxes, notebook-style tools, or pedagogy-heavy products.
- Experience with LangGraph, Claude Agent SDK, or similar workflow tooling.
Responsibilities
- Own the user journey from early research question to draft refinement and evidence review.
- Design guardrails that enforce coaching behavior instead of drifting into ghostwriting.
- Build multi-step agentic workflows with strong traceability, citation grounding, and failure handling.
- Talk to students, parents, or educators to learn where the process helps versus harms.
- Work with AI Fund's build team on product positioning, pedagogy, and technical tradeoffs.
Benefits
- $10,000/month for 12 weeks ($30,000 total)
- Founder-level role with meaningful equity upside if the idea works
- AI Fund writes a $1M check at a $4M valuation if the idea validates
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Entry Level
Education Level
No Education Listed
Number of Employees
11-50 employees
