Lead Engineer / VP of Engineering

Inkah is rebuilding language learning from the bottom up by bringing the creator economy to language learning and in the future, learning at large. Our team is looking for a full-time leader of Engineering. We have recently been recruited into the Berkeley SkyDeck accelerator (a 1% acceptance rate) in the Bay Area and are looking for someone to run with us for 5 months leading up to Demo Day and Investor Month in April.

Our current technologies include Typescript, Node.js, AI / Natural Language Processing, Web extension development, Postgres, React, and React Native for mobile development. Stack can be redone as necessary by the leader to meet product and fundraising objectives.

Must haves:

• Growth mindset and willingness to learn
• Can receive and digest feedback to accelerate personal growth
• Seeking to build useful things for society
• Speak and write English at minimum an intermediate level
• Team-first mindset and understanding a great company comes from mutual commitment
• Willingness to have fun and enjoy the ride

Nice to haves:

• Interest in language learning, education technology, or AI / Natural Language Processing

We're a small team so each member needs to be proactive, have discipline, and solve problems. Life is short so we also believe in work-life balance, having a good time both in and outside work, and just generally being a pleasant person to be around. If the above sounds like you, you're probably a fit for Inkah.

What is Inkah

Inkah is a marketplace to help language learners, especially intermediate and above, find progressively more difficult content for topics they care about. An intermediate learner could filter by the topic of ‘business’ and practice with a personalized playlist that focuses only on this topic but still takes them through the grammar progression of a textbook with real examples from the community. The content is curated by the community and creators to advance the listening, reading, writing, and speaking abilities of learners and can come in the form of audio or video with transcripts or text passages with audio recordings.

We already support reading articles on the web and watching videos on Netflix with our Chrome and Firefox extensions. While reading on the web, you can hover to translate words or select passages of text to translate. For Netflix, you can display both English and target language subtitles at the same time, translate words, and get the list of words for a subtitle line. We started with Chinese and Korean because Asian languages are the fastest growing but the most underserved.

Inkah currently has 2,833+ weekly active language learners and is growing. It's still extremely early in the company's life, but there is clearly potential.

What you'll do

Work with the team to build out the mobile app and website

We're in the works to launch our mobile app and our interactive website in addition to our Chrome and Firefox extensions. We operate on a fortnightly weekly sprint cycle and need help bringing them to life. We’ve started with React Native to move fast but are happy to migrate depending on the leader’s preference for meeting our product and fundraising objectives.

Be the architect of our backend and NLP / ML pipeline

This would include an API gateway for querying data from our backend to be consumed by the API clients. We also seek to be best-in-class for natural language processing technology and will need to build infrastructure to reflect those ambitions.

Build out a world-class Engineering team

It takes a village and we want to build a world-class Engineering team whose values align. We can put food on the table AND create useful products for society that do good.

Who we are

Inkah is a team of 10. Members of our team include the former co-founder and CTO of 99.co, the second-largest property platform in Southeast Asia, ex-Pixar, and current educators and linguists.

Please feel free to pass this along to any friends or colleagues looking for opportunities and reach out if you have any questions.

Overall, we want to always be learning, do our best work, enable and push each other to grow, and build useful products that help people become the best versions of themselves. Language is the closest bridge between two people, and we love helping build that bridge.

What we offer

Compensation

Because Inkah is very early on in its journey, full-time and part-time roles are currently equity-based with negotiation for salary.

Real work

Work on real applications and challenges for our language learning community. Our job is to help our community be able to better connect with others and we find it as rewarding as it is challenging.

A challenging but nurturing work environment

You will be provided the lessons, guidance, and expectations to learn and grow rapidly. We expect every member of the team to be effective and produce results, but we will be there every step of the way to ensure each member of the team is also becoming the best version of themselves.

Out-sized and diverse responsibility

A small company size means you will have a greater diversity of tasks and broader decision-making responsibility vs. larger organizations. Out of necessity, everyone needs to take ownership and make an impact. You will learn the skills to think independently, solve company problems, and feel true ownership of your craft.

Future career support

Careers evolve and jobs change. We're happy to fight for you for future jobs, provide references, and provide recommendation letters.

Insight into what it takes to build a Startup

Between them, the members of the team have a wealth of lessons on company building. Sharing is one of our core values and we will pass on whatever we know so you may be more effective in any future venture you join or start.