Remote Founding Engineer Jobs in California (NOW HIRING)

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 matter. 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:

• Designing learning experiences students genuinely enjoy using
• Helping every student make measurable progress through personalized, AI-powered tutoring
• Defining how Athena remembers what students know and decides what they should learn next
• Building the systems that measure whether students are actually learning and not just completing exercises
• Establishing the engineering architecture, tooling, and standards that allow Athena to move quickly as we scale
• Partnering with the founder on product direction, technical strategy, and building the engineering team

At a skill level, you'll work across:

• Full-stack product development spanning frontend, backend, AI systems, and infrastructure
• Production AI systems that combine reasoning, retrieval, evaluation, and continuous improvement from student interactions
• Product quality, performance, and user experience
• Engineering architecture, developer tooling, and infrastructure that enable rapid, high-quality iteration

This role spans the entire stack. One week you may be designing a new learning experience or refining how Athena adapts to an individual student. The next week, you may be improving AI evaluation systems, optimizing infrastructure, strengthening engineering foundations, or shipping features inspired directly by student feedback.
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, hiring, and engineering culture: As one of the earliest employees, you'll help shape not only the product, but how Athena operates.

What You Bring
Must Have

• Experience building and shipping production software across multiple layers of the stack. You've built full products real customers depend on.
• Strong product instincts and engineering judgment. You instinctively know when something feels unfinished.
• Exceptional attention to user experience and product quality. You care about details most people never notice.
• The ability to turn ambiguous ideas into polished, intuitive products.
• Experience talking directly with users and incorporating feedback into product decisions. You regularly sync with users because product intuition isn't built from dashboards.
• A track record of operating independently in early-stage or fast-moving environments.
• AI makes you faster, not less rigorous, accelerating development without compromising quality.
• You want to spend the next several years building something from zero.

We're less interested in your exact technology stack than your judgment, curiosity, and ability to build products people genuinely love.
Nice to Have

• 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

This role probably isn't for you if

• You prefer clear requirements over ambiguous problems
• You want someone else deciding what to build
• You're optimizing for elegant architecture instead of student outcomes
• You see engineering as separate from product

What You Get

• A defining role as the first engineer at an AI-native education company
• Direct partnership with the founder on product and technical strategy
• Competitive salary and meaningful equity
• Ownership over both technical and product direction from day one
• The opportunity to help define the future of personalized education

How to Apply
Please include:

• Your résumé or LinkedIn profile
• Show us something you've built that people actually use. We'd rather explore one product deeply than skim ten GitHub repositories.
• A few sentences about why Athena's mission resonates with you.

We're looking for someone who wants to invent how millions of students learn with AI, not to implement a roadmap. If that excites you more than the title on your business card, we'd love to meet you.