Founding Engineer

Athena Verified is looking for a Founding Engineer to help build the future of hiring.

We’re building an AI-native recruiting platform designed to make hiring more intelligent, transparent, and human.

Today, job seekers are often left in a “resume black hole” — they apply, hear nothing, and have no idea what happened. On the other side, recruiters spend enormous amounts of time manually reviewing applications, screening candidates, coordinating interviews, and moving people through hiring pipelines.

We want to change that.

Athena is building toward an Agentic ATS that can intelligently match candidates to roles, screen applicants, move candidates through hiring pipelines, schedule interviews, and keep candidates informed throughout the process.

Our vision includes:

AI-powered candidate matching and fit scoring
Automated candidate screening
AI-generated screening questions and interview plans
Autonomous hiring pipeline progression
Real-time candidate application tracking
Constructive feedback for rejected candidates
Verified/Vetted candidate profiles
Job distribution across multiple job boards
Google Calendar and Outlook integration
Deep Microsoft Teams integration
AI agents that work alongside recruiters rather than simply storing candidate data

The long-term goal is not to build another traditional ATS.

We want to build an AI recruiting engine.

The Role

As a Founding Engineer, you won't just be given tickets and asked to implement features.

You’ll work directly with the founder to shape the product, architecture, engineering culture, and technical direction of the company.

You’ll have significant ownership over what we build and how we build it.

You may work across:

Full-stack product development
Backend architecture and APIs
AI/LLM integrations and agentic workflows
Candidate matching and ranking systems
Data modeling and infrastructure
Third-party integrations
Authentication and security
Real-time application pipelines
Performance and scalability
Developer tooling and engineering practices

The current product already has a foundation. The next major stage is expanding the company-side platform into a full ATS and eventually into the autonomous recruiting system described in our product roadmap.

Who We're Looking For

We're looking for someone who is:

A strong full-stack engineer
Comfortable working independently
Excited about AI-native products
Comfortable with ambiguity and early-stage startups
Able to make architectural decisions rather than waiting for instructions
Interested in owning systems from idea → implementation → production
Passionate about building products, not just writing code
Willing to challenge ideas and contribute to product decisions

You do not need to know every technology in our stack.

What matters more is that you can learn quickly, reason about systems, and take ownership.

This Is a Founding Role

This is not a conventional salaried engineering position right now.

We are an early-stage startup and are currently operating with limited capital.

Compensation initially will be equity rather than salary.

The right person will receive meaningful founding-level equity and become an early member of the company, with the opportunity to grow alongside Athena as we raise capital and scale.

As the company reaches funding and revenue milestones, the role is intended to transition into a paid engineering position.

We're being upfront about this because we're looking for someone who genuinely wants to build a company — not someone simply looking for another job.

Why Join?

You would be joining at the stage where your decisions can have an enormous impact.

You won't be engineer #47 maintaining an existing system.

You'll help determine:

What gets built.
How it gets built.
How the architecture evolves.
And ultimately, what Athena becomes.

If you're excited by the idea of building an AI-native recruiting platform from the ground up, we'd love to hear from you.

If you're interested, apply through Wellfound and tell us what you've built, what you're excited about, and why Athena interests you.