/roles — ROLE_400
Founding Engineer
Edtech startup equipping school counselors with data-driven college guidance drawn from real application results
The role
- COMP
- $150K - $190K
- EQUITY
- Competitive
- LOCATION
- New York
- WORKPLACE
- On-site
- EXPERIENCE
- 0 - 5 years
- VISA
- None
- STACK
- TypeScript, React, Next.js, NodeJS, Express, MongoDB, Mongo, AWS
- INDUSTRY
- Education, Edtech, AI, Data, B2B, Cybersecurity, Security
The company
An edtech company that gives students in grades 7 to 12 tailored guidance on colleges and careers, drawing on a large, privacy-safe dataset of real admissions outcomes.
- STAGE
- seed-stage
- FUNDING
- seed funding
- TEAM
- founding team of <10
- FOUNDED
- 2023
JD — the work
About the role
You would be a full-stack founding engineer who leans on AI coding agents to move at the pace of a much bigger team. You would build core systems from nothing, connect LLMs to real workflows, and uncover patterns in one of the largest college-application datasets in the US, where getting privacy and accuracy right is essential. The company is shifting from a free product to district-level sales, and the small team works in person in Manhattan.
What you'll do
- Take core systems from initial commit to live production on your own
- Release weekly updates that counselors use when advising families on big decisions
- Build LLM features that run in real production use, beyond prototypes
- Weigh speed against security, reliability, and scalability when making architecture choices
- Operate without detailed specs, framing problems yourself before solving them
- Find patterns in a large admissions dataset while protecting student privacy
What they're looking for
- 0 to 5 years of experience with exceptional full-stack development ability
- Skill at orchestrating AI coding agents to move faster than a much larger team
- Experience with TypeScript, React, Next.js, Node.js, Express, MongoDB, and AWS
- A mission-first, self-directed approach and a habit of getting sharper every week
- Availability to work on-site in Manhattan
Nice to have
- Security experience, valuable given the sensitive student data
- Experience with data analytics and finding insight in large datasets
- Background in product management alongside engineering