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Emerge Career · 5 months ago

Founding Product Engineer

New York, NY, US

Full-time

Onsite

Mid Level

$80K/yr - $150K/yr

Emerge Career is dedicated to breaking the cycle of poverty and incarceration by creating pathways to second chances through technology. They are seeking a Founding Product Engineer who will be responsible for supporting students, developing scalable systems, and improving the product while engaging directly with users. This role combines technical, support, and program operations responsibilities to enhance the overall user experience and product efficacy.

CommunitiesHuman ResourcesTraining

Responsibilities

Coaching students. You’ll support students throughout their training journey—not just by building tools, but by directly engaging with them. This means texting, calling, and helping students one-on-one when needed. At the same time, you’ll take what you learn from those interactions and turn it into scalable systems and smart automations. You’ll be doing both engineering and non-engineering work to make sure students succeed and the product keeps improving

Talking to students. Good founding engineers read feedback and iterate quickly. Great founding engineers have users they're friendly with, talk with them frequently, bounce ideas off them, and iterate with them when they ship new things

Doing support. This is an engineering role with key program management responsibilities. You’ll work directly with students every day. That requires patience, empathy, and a willingness to meet people where they are. You’ll help investigate and resolve product issues, and you’ll take ownership of making the product better through what you learn

Documenting your work and its impact. Our work is complex, spans months, and involves multiple teams. Clear documentation and communication are critical. You’ll be responsible for creating awareness when a change impacts operations, and for helping others understand how features affect different parts of training and service delivery. Precision matters

Owning products and features end to end. You won’t just take tickets. You’ll originate ideas based on user conversations, your own instincts, and our larger strategy. You’ll test MVPs in production, iterate based on real feedback, and stay accountable to the long-term success of your work. We build in React and TypeScript. If you like shipping for the sake of it, this role isn’t for you. If you like shipping with purpose and ownership, you’ll love it here

Implementing AI features and operational workflows. This is last for a reason. We don’t jump to automation. We do things manually first to fully understand the problem—then we build. If you care about applying AI meaningfully, not just for hype, this is the right place

Qualification

Node.jsReactTypeScriptAI product developmentCoachingEd-tech experienceOperations collaboration

Required

Willing to relocate and work in-person in New York City

Passionate about working with underrepresented communities and tackling challenges related to poverty and inequity

Experience taking a project from 0 to 1. You might have led a project, been a founder previously, built an impressive side project, or been one of the first 10 employees at an early stage startup

Experience building AI-native products, or integrating AI into existing software

You love working with React and Typescript