Goblins | https://goblinsapp.com | Founding Engineer #3 | Williamsburg, New York | ONSITE | $100-200k (+ generous equity)
At Goblins, we're building America's favorite teacher, starting with K-12 math. We're live in thousands of classrooms for in-class assignments, extra practice, and homework. Students work on a whiteboard while our models analyze their work in real time and nudge them with questions that make them think. Teachers get instant visibility into how the class is doing, who needs help, and what to assign next.
We just raised our seed round and are backed by the Gates Foundation, giving us the ability to build something transformative in education.
Here's what you might work on:
- Create shareable "aha moment" videos from real student sessions.
Turn anonymized whiteboard work and Goblin–student dialogues into short videos or interactive replays that highlight the value of Goblins. Automatically identify the best moments, strip out sensitive data, and produce artifacts that teachers, parents, and districts want to watch and share.
- Rewrite our diffusion transformer real-time avatar stack.
Our Goblin avatars are already in production. Improve audio–motion sync, temporal coherence, and expressiveness, while cutting latency and cost so they run smoothly at 100k+ student scale.
- Extend continuous diagnostics to high-stakes like the SAT and ACT.
We track mastery against state standards with our spin on IRT. Extend this to SAT/ACT-style exams: infer score distributions from behavior, validate on real data, and compute minimal targeted practice that reliably moves predicted scores.
- Design uncheatable problem formats.
Generative AI can solve most traditional math problems and show fake work. Build formats where copying is harder than thinking: dynamic graphs, constructive proofs, counterexample generation, debugging flawed solutions, multi-step conceptual checks. Make them auto-gradable, resistant to copy-paste, and stable at scale.
- Build real-time instructional agents.
Detect underlying student misconceptions from their work and have an agent "drop in" only when needed. It should generate short, visual, 3blue1brown-style explanations tailored to the specific misunderstanding, and create diagrams, animations, and interactive examples that adapt as the student responds.
The role is based in our Williamsburg, Brooklyn office in NYC (on-site only). You'll join our tight-knit founding engineering team of 3—myself (the CTO) and two founding engineers with collective experience from Stanford, Stripe, Amazon, and X1.
As our third founding engineer, you'll have full ownership of critical projects and ship production systems that impact thousands of students and teachers in real classrooms within your first few weeks.
If this sounds fun, and you want to help inspire 1 billion kids to love to learn, email alp@goblinsapp.com :)