Head of Engineering 

About Alice

Alice makes personalized learning accessible for students and teachers using the latest in AI and LLMs. Already, 50,000+ students use Alice.

In 2025 we joined Y Combinator’s W25 batch in San Francisco and raised nearly $6M to scale.

Though still small, our team punches above its weight – with backgrounds from top universities, McKinsey, Oxford, PhDs in statistics, 10+ years of teaching, and even Denmark’s top high school GPA.

We’re building a true A-team – because it’s most fun to work with smart, driven people on a mission that matters.

The Role

We’re looking for an extraordinary Head of Engineering who will lead our engineering and AI team. There is no current CTO — only the CEO above this role.

Today, the team consists of 6 talented engineers and AI scientists, but it will be growing fast. You’ll be hands-on in the codebase while also setting the bar for engineering excellence, building out the team, and owning our technical direction. Perform fantastically, and this role progresses into CTO.

This is a prime time to join:

• Early enough that you’ll shape the company and have real ownership

• Late enough that we’ve already raised major funding, built traction, and made our first key hires

About You

• Pilot, not passenger – You’re intrinsically driven and thrive in environments without a playbook. You take ownership – both literal and figurative.

• Engineer with a capital E – You know how to ship fast and build solid foundations. You balance speed and structure, and you’ve done it before at scale.

• Leader & builder – You’ve led teams, mentored engineers, and know how to create a high-performance, ambitious culture. But you are ready to roll up your sleeves and build yourself!

What You’ll Do

• Lead the entire engineering team and set technical direction

• Build across the stack: from cloud infrastructure to web and mobile apps

• Collaborate cross-functionally with data scientists, designers, and business stakeholders

• Shape and scale engineering practices around contributions, testing, deployment, and security

• Recruit, mentor, and inspire a growing team of engineers

Requirements

• Mindset – fantastic work ethic and high ambition

• Full-stack development (frontend + backend) with major frameworks

• Relational databases – design and optimization

• Cloud providers – AWS, Azure, or GCP

• Testing – thorough, reliable test writing

• Languages – strong proficiency in Python and TypeScript

• Experience – 8+ years of professional software development, including leadership experience

• Education – MSc in Computer Science/Engineering (or equivalent professional experience)

Nice-to-haves

• Vue.js

• Building and scaling LLM pipelines

• DevOps & CI/CD

• Security best practices

• Big data engineering (e.g. Spark, MapReduce)

What We Offer

• Clear path to CTO – if performance is fantastic

• Early leadership role – lead the entire engineering team with only the CEO above you

• Prime time to join – shape the company early, with the security of strong funding and traction

• Ambitious culture

• Purposeful mission worth working hard for

• Competitive package – including stock options

   

We look forward to hearing from you!