Founding Engineer

About us

Arrowster is an SF-based startup building the AI-native platform for studying abroad. We&aposre backed by the founding team and board at OpenAI, Duolingo, and Meta.

Our product is a vertical AI agent for international education / studying abroad starting with Vietnam and SEA. AI will centralise all the insights students need, provide 24/7 support on basic queries, and eliminate boring paperwork. Meanwhile expert counselors step in to provide support where it matters most.

Mission

Automate the $100B student mobility market and own the financial relationship for 2M+ international students annually.

What you&aposll do

- Build the Brain: Design and extend Python-based microservices that power our AI agents, from RAG pipelines and vector stores to ML models (classifiers, rankers, NLP). Your work decides how smart the product feels.

- Ship ML at Scale: Take experiments (scikit-learn, HuggingFace, LangChain, TensorFlow, etc.) and turn them into production pipelines. Youll own the full lifecycle - architecture, Docker, CI/CD, monitoring - and make sure models dont just work in notebooks, but in the real world.

- Replatform the Stack: Lead our migration from bare-metal infra to a modern cloud/K8s/dockerized environment. It&aposs not just maintenance work, you&aposll be architecting the next-gen platform well scale on.

- Hack Growth with Automation: Apply engineering to GTM problems auto-generate content, spin up campaign flows, and script creative marketing automations. Youll get to prove how engineering can bend growth curves.

Requirements

- 25 years of production Python experience, ideally in fast-moving teams.

- Solid with REST/gRPC microservices, async patterns, Docker, and CI/CD pipelines.

- Familiar with ML pipelines using libraries like scikit-learn, transformers, LangChain, etc.

- Exposure to vector DBs (Pinecone, pgvector, Weaviate) and RAG workflows.

- Experience working with SQL (MySQL) + NoSQL (MongoDB).

- Curiosity for GTM / growth automation (content, analytics) and how AI accelerates it.

Bonus points for

- Familiarity with Laravel or PHP-based backend ecosystems.

- Previous work with LLM orchestration, agent logic, or other 3rd party tools.

- Cloud experience on AWS / GCP / Azure.

- Strong technical writing skills with a portfolio of blogs, docs, or tutorials.

This role is not for everyone

- 6-day work week in HCMC - we&aposre always building, but weekends are more flexible.

- Technical ownership from Day 1 - you&aposll architect systems that thousands of students depend on.

- Urgency - ship in days what others take months to build.

This is what you&aposll gain

- Founding team equity and top-of-market salary (50M+, based on experience).

- Work directly with our CTO who has deep expertise in distributed data systems, previously processing millions of data points daily for global trading desks at Goldman Sachs.

- Technical autonomy to architect AI solutions from scratch that directly impact student futures.

- Learning curve that outpaces most engineers twice your age.

- Work with people who match your intensity.