Founding Engineer

About this role

Founding Engineer

Location: Remote or San Francisco Bay Area (Preferred)

Format: Full-time

The Mission

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 super{set} , 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.

The Role

We're looking for our first Founding Engineer who will define Athena as much as the founder does and help build both the product and the technical foundation at Athena.

You'll spend more time debating product decisions with the founder to turn ambitious ideas into software students genuinely love using (instead of implementing tickets). You'll help define our engineering culture, shape the product roadmap, and establish what AI-native learning should look like.

This role goes well beyond engineering execution. Great education products sit at the intersection of engineering, product, design, psychology, and learning science. Every engineering decision changes how someone learns.

We're looking for someone who wants to build a great company, not just write code.

How We Build

We care as much about how we build as what we build.

• Product taste and good design matters. We believe great design keeps students engaged. We obsess over the moments most teams ignore:

• the pacing of an explanation, the moment encouragement appears, the friction between opening the app and making progress. We want Athena to feel less like educational software and more like a product students genuinely look forward to using. If Athena feels like "another AI app," we've failed.

• Students’ outcomes win every argument. Every decision starts with one question: Does this genuinely help students learn?

• Ship early and learn fast. We believe real student behavior is more valuable than internal debate. We ship, observe, learn, and iterate relentlessly.

• AI should raise the quality bar. We use AI throughout our development process to move faster, but never to lower our standards. AI should amplify craftsmanship, not replace it.

Why This Role Matters

The hard problem is building software students trust enough to learn with every day. That means solving personalization, memory, motivation, evaluation, and product design at once.

As Athena's first Founding Engineer, you'll help define what AI-native education looks like. You'll influence not only the architecture, but also the product, the culture, and the standards we build around.

The architectural decisions you make in year one may still shape Athena a decade from now.

What You'll Own

You'll 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

• At a skill level:

• 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

This role spans the entire stack. One week you may be designing a new tutoring experience. The next you may be improving AI evaluation systems, refining onboarding, optimizing infrastructure, or shipping features inspired directly by student feedback.

You'll help decide what gets built, not just how it's built.

What Success Looks Like

During your first 6 to 9 months, your focus will be on three priorities.

Students voluntarily return every week: Build the next versions of Athena and the learning experiences that students return to because they genuinely help them make progress. Engineering velocity increases rather than slows: Establish scalable architecture, engineering standards, and systems that allow the company to move quickly without sacrificing quality. Partner closely with the founder on product direction, architecture, hir

Similar jobs

• Founding Engineer — Appliedlabs · New York
• Founding Engineer — Pear-vc · San Francisco Bay Area
• Founding Engineer — Hexa · Remote
• Founding Engineer — Ghost · San Francisco
• Founding Engineer — Flowtel · San Francisco HQ
• Founding Engineer — Applytotruebuilt · Remote
• Founding Engineer — Sailorhealth · Remote
• Founding Engineer — Replo · San Francisco