Founding Engineer

About us:
ESAI has aided more than 350,000 students in personal storytelling and college access over the last year using emerging AI technology. If you’re excited by the idea of building something that helps all kinds of students learn about themselves and access opportunities — something early stage that already has major traction — this is the role for you. Some highlights:

• Our quick growth is largely due to organic TikTok virality - we’ve reached 22.5 million students on the platform in one year by resonating with a very real pain point.
• We help real people. We estimate ESAI has already saved families over $100M in advising costs.
• ESAI has raised a $1.25M pre-seed round from investors including Precursor Ventures, Flybridge, FullCircle Fund, and Betaworks.
• We’ve been featured in TechCrunch,
• Check out our recent demo at Betaworks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BTeMPtk_tM

🏗️ More about you:

• 0 → 1: You can build new products extremely quickly that help our students with their storytelling process. Our customers want new features, and we don’t have enough time to satisfy current demand.
• 1 → N: You’re ready to scale current products and infra to support 100x growth.
• You want to grow and lead a technical team - this position allows for the potentially swift opportunity to grow into a CTO role and beyond!
• You’re a power user of Cursor, Zed, etc., and energized by building and shipping quickly
• As a Founding Engineer, you’re excited by the opportunity to help shape our technology choices, but today our stack is:
  • Next.JS, TypeScript, Python, Remix, Typescript, PostgreSQL, OpenAI
• You thrive in early-stage startups: You are scrappy, and can work well in a fast-paced environment, and can adapt quickly to changing circumstances and meet tight deadlines. Bonus points if you’re a founder of VC-backed or bootstrapped companies.
• You are a strong communicator, care deeply about impact and access, understand Gen Z, and have a good sense of humor. You’re excited about our mission to help students of all backgrounds learn about themselves and share their story with the world.
• Experience building with tools like vector databases, Langchain, RAG, multi-agentic frameworks, running model evals, prompt engineering

🚀 Benefits:

• Flexible working location and hours (New York City area preferred but not required)
• Minimum of 25 days vacation
• Healthcare reimbursement plans
• Ability to grow into any role: As a small team, you'll have the opportunity to take on various responsibilities as we scale and grow quickly

✉️ How to Apply:

Please send the following to [email protected]. The subject should include FOUNDING ENGINEER APP:

• Resume/CV in whatever form it exists (PDF, LinkedIn, website, etc)
• Portfolio of notable work (GitHub, pubs, ArXiv, blog, X, etc)
• Statement of alignment specific to ESAI — how do you identify with our mission, how can you contribute, etc? (points for brief, substantive, heterodox)

Applications without these 3 items won’t be considered, but be sure to optimize for speed over perfection. If relevant, be sure to credit the LLM you used.

Link to Full Description: https://slime-tanker-2a8.notion.site/ESAI-is-seeking-a-Founding-Engineer-13d2299c93c9808f88dbfde79ca1767d