Software Engineer

WE ARE NOT ACTIVELY HIRING FOR THIS ROLE but we're always interested in connecting with exceptional candidates. If that's you, read on for more details.

About Mentava

We’re Mentava. Our mission is to accelerate human achievement through education.

We’re backed by Quiet, Floodgate, and more than 50 amazing angels like Tim Ferriss, Eric Ries, Garry Tan, Des Traynor, Balaji Srinivasan, Sheel Mohnot, Austen Allred, Amjad Masad, Mikhael Seregine, Jonathan Swanson, Dylan Field, Julian Weisser, and others. 

Mentava is building software to support independent, accelerated K12 learning. We:

1. Teach kids to teach themselves

2. Provide software that lets them learn at their own, accelerated pace

3. Show teachers the benefits of allowing independent study in their classes

In our pilot, it took about 50 hours to get 2-year olds reading at a 2nd grade level. That’s about 30 mins a day(!) over 3 months(!) to cover what would take multiple years in school. And that accelerated pace of learning compounds: a child who can learn 2 years of content in a year should be a year ahead after kindergarten, 2 years ahead after 1st grade, 3 years ahead after 2nd grade…

We fully expect our students to complete college-level math and programming before high school.

Education creates pathways to success for kids of every socioeconomic class. When we encourage learning and achievement, we improve our society and our communities. Ultimately, to accelerate education is to accelerate human achievement.

How many lives would be lost if the MRNA vaccine came a year later? How many lives will be saved if humanity can cure cancer 1 year sooner? It’s no exaggeration to say that millions of lives are at stake.

About the Role

As a Software Engineer, you will help build our first product, a learn-to-read app for 2- and 3-year-olds. Our MVP has already been validated by paying customers. Now it’s time to ship something better. You will uphold high standards for our code, our development process, and our hires. 

Your decisions will have a significant impact on how children are educated, as well as Mentava’s success as a company. You must be comfortable with hard problems, making mistakes, and learning quickly.

Hiring is everyone’s responsibility at a high growth startup. You will be part of a world-class hiring engine that hires world-class teammates. If you haven’t hired at scale before, we will teach you how.

What you’ll be doing:

• Re-imagining the future of education

• Building games that optimize for pace of learning, not mindless engagement

• Building experiences to educate and delight 2-year-olds

• Improving application performance by profiling

• Collaborate with the rest of the founding team to rapidly ship and iterate

• Helping define our core values for effective software development

Who you are:

• Strong supporter of gifted education

• Ship quickly

• Love learning new things and mastering new problem spaces

• Thrive on the uncertainty of early stage product development

• Can identify the most valuable area to direct your effort

• Makes pragmatic near-term decisions for ambitious long-term goals

• Care deeply about user experience

• Care deeply about developer experience

• Care deeply about software quality and performance

• Good communication skills, both spoken and written. You will write documentation!

• Believer in ownership, autonomy, and accountability

• Great teammate and collaborator

Nice to haves

• Previous founder

• Game development experience

• Mobile development experience

What you’ll get

• A chance to show policymakers what kids can really do

• Early seat on the next hot vertical

• Experience of taking a product from 0-1

• No politics

• Fully remote company (North American working hours required)

• Team alignment around a single mission

• Competitive comp

• Generous equity

• Employee-friendly equity terms

• Macbook Pro, 5K display and accessories

• Stipend to set up your home office

• Professional development budget

• Benefits