Founding Product Engineer
About Paloma
The achievement gap has remained unchanged over the past half century, despite trillions invested in classroom intervention. Research shows that families—not schools—are the biggest determinant of student success. Parents’ love for their children is the single greatest—and most underutilized—natural resource in education.
Paloma is a venture-backed edtech startup that harnesses AI to unleash parents' untapped teaching potential. Our mobile web app helps marginalized families build and sustain a habit of tutoring their kids for 15 minutes a day. Imagine parents sitting with their kids and engaging in rigorous, curriculum-aligned, and joyful instruction daily. By the time students enter middle school, Paloma users will have given their kids the equivalent of an entire extra year of school!
In our partner networks—including Houston ISD, KIPP, & Rocketship—75% of all families in participating grades are tutoring their kids using Paloma, and 70% of participating families are tutoring their kids at least 3x per week. A recent study showed that parents using Paloma accelerated their children’s reading growth by 39% more than non-users in just three months. As one district leader put it, “Paloma awakens the sleeping giant of parents as tutors.” Paloma is on a path to fundamentally transform education such that families and educators work together—rather than in isolation—to support student learning.
About the role
As Paloma's Founding Product Engineer, you'll be Paloma's first full time engineering hire. You will work closely with the CTO—and entire team—to build user-facing products that redefine how families help their children achieve their fullest learning potential.
As our Founding Product Engineer, you’ll dive deep into Paloma’s most exciting engineering challenges. You’ll leverage AI to generate books in which children literally see themselves as protagonists in their own personalized stories. You’ll help ensure Paloma’s coaching for parents is dynamic, rigorous, and accessible in every language. You’ll build an ecosystem of features that optimize habit development, with support from Duolingo’s former Chief Product Officer (current Paloma advisor). Your code will help us 10x Paloma’s scale in the next year, and 1000x beyond that – changing the default for how students learn across the country, then the globe.
This vital work calls for you to:
- Discover and define product problems facing our users (Districts, Schools, Teachers, and Families) and empathically build solutions with a laserlike focus on user experience.
- Collaborate cross-functionally with partnerships, product, design, and content.
- Contribute to high-level strategic decisions. It’s still a small team: your voice will be heard, your fingerprints will be on company decisions, and your initials will be etched into the foundation of the massive global company we build.
This role is a good fit if you’re a highly skilled engineer who wants to channel your talents toward social good as part of a high-performing, vibrant, & driven team. Perhaps you even want to start your own mission-driven company someday! As a fast-paced, high flying startup, Paloma is the best entrepreneurial bootcamp you’ll find.
Paloma serves an ethnically, and socioeconomically diverse audience, which is enabled by a team which reflects that makeup. We believe a wide set of lived experiences will help Paloma create better outcomes for students and their families. If you believe you have the skills to succeed in this role, even if your resume might not adequately reflect that skill, you are encouraged to apply.
Qualifications/Candidate Profile:
- You have 3+ years of experience as a Software Engineer building user-facing products. You love to build.
- You love talking to stakeholders, both internal and external, to help understand the problem landscape. You want to help shape product decisions.
- You are obsessed with creating and implementing scalable systems with a keen ability to weigh tradeoffs and communicate about them.
- You’re energized to work in a fast-evolving environment— driving work forward proactively, contributing to product strategy, and persisting through challenges.
- You have demonstrated ability in excellent decision quality, critical thinking, and creative problem solving skills.
- You have expertise in architecting and maintaining RDBMS systems. We use Postgres at Paloma.
- You are super detail-oriented, leaving no stone unturned.
Bonus Points
- While you have lots of backend experience – you are comfortable, and excited by, the prospect of building across multiple mediums – web, mobile, frontend, backend, desktop. You are a full stack generalist.
- You have experience with our tech stack – Python/Django, HTMX, React, Typescript.
- You are biased towards choosing boring technology, but keep yourself up to date on newer patterns, tools and strategies. For example, you might have an interest in using formal methods to ensure correctness.
- You have some experience in elementary teaching, elementary literacy/math instructional design, and/or school leadership.
Salary & Benefits
- $130-180k commensurate with experience, alongside equity. (Paloma recently raised a 5X oversubscribed seed round from top investors at a generous valuation, and we’re on the fast track to profitability.)
- Generous + family-friendly health & retirement benefits.
- 20 days PTO annually plus federal and company holidays.
- Fully remote team with a vibrant culture. (Everyone says their team is great, but our team and culture are truly magical. You’ll judge for yourself 🙂 Paloma is also a uniquely diverse workplace: 94% of our staff, contractors, and advisors come from traditionally marginalized groups.)
Send your resume & quick self-introduction via email to jobs@palomalearning.com with the subject heading “Founding Product Engineer”