<aside> 🤫 We’re in stealth… but here’s a bit about us that we can share right now…
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Join our team of the smartest in education - from Harvard, MIT, and Princeton, and the builders that brought apps to millions of users for the NBA, NFL, Adidas, and Shopify. Startups that we previously helped build have been backed by Sequoia, A16Z, Inovia - and have raised >$1bn.
We raised $2.5m USD in our seed round. Our investors today include incredibly mission aligned folks such as:
Founder, Sun Microsystems
Founder, Curriki
Former CTO, Coinbase
Former GP, A16Z
Former CEO, Macmillan Publishers
Former CEO, eHealth
We're building the best way to teach your children.
<aside> 🎓 Our customers score ~40% higher than public school students.
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We want to scale that across the US, and then the world. We truly believe it is the most important business to build for this generation.
<aside> 🚀 Our mission is to increase the average IQ of humanity.
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As a Principal Software Engineer, you will lead the design and development of the core technical systems behind Astral’s AI-driven learning platform, spanning backend architecture, infrastructure, data systems, model pipelines, evals, and the serving layers that generate and deliver personalized curriculum at scale. You should be highly comfortable working across distributed systems, AI cost optimization, databases, Kubernetes, data-intensive applications, observability, and production infrastructure, while still being able to dive deep into backend product logic when needed. This role is for an engineer who can simplify complexity, make excellent architectural decisions under ambiguity, and raise the technical ceiling of the entire company. We would only like to work with engineers who truly believe they can build just about anything, and who care deeply about reliability, scalability, latency, cost, and craft.
As a Senior Backend Engineer, you will lead the development of the backend systems that drive pipelines and logic for AI-driven teaching workflows, and the creation of freshly minted, AI-generated multimodal learning content. You will be implementing backend business logic with a key attention to detail - build something you would love to use. You should be highly comfortable with systems design, architecture, API logic, data structures, and databases and shipping production-ready code. We would only like to work with other engineers who also truly believe they can build just about anything.
As a Senior Frontend Engineer, you will craft intuitive, responsive, and pixel-perfect user experiences across multiple platforms, translating design systems, UX wireframes, prototypes, and product requirements into stellar frontend experiences. You should consider yourself a true craftsperson with React— understanding its inner workings, deeply attentive to detail, and wanting to write elegant, minimal code. You should have great taste when it comes to frontend interactions, cross-platform usability, performant design patterns, state management, and componentization. Depth with CSS/HTML/JS is a must if you’d like to have complete control of the DOM and the browser on all platforms.