Founding Engineer: SwaVid

Location: Bengaluru
Type: Full-time
Experience: 1–4 years
Compensation: Salary + meaningful ESOPs

About SwaVid

SwaVid is building a cognitive operating system for K–10 learning.

Most education platforms start with the lesson. We start with the child.

We understand how a student thinks, learns, responds to mistakes, handles cognitive load, and retains concepts. We then use that understanding to create adaptive learning experiences, interactive simulations, mini-games, and Socratic conversations.

Our goal is simple: identify learning debt early and help students actually understand concepts, not just memorise answers.

The Role

We are looking for a Founding Engineer who can take ideas from a rough sketch to a working product.

This is not a “pick a Jira ticket and change a button colour” role.

You will work closely with the founders, designers, educators, and ML engineers to build:

• Interactive learning activities and educational mini-games

• Student, parent, and teacher-facing products

• Adaptive learning and cognitive diagnostic systems

• AI-powered learning experiences

• Curriculum ingestion and knowledge graph infrastructure

• Backend systems, APIs, databases, analytics, and deployments

Some days, you may build a physics simulation. On other days, you may spend three hours discovering that the bug was caused by one missing environment variable.

What You Will Own

• Build and ship features from idea to production

• Make frontend, backend, and architecture decisions

• Turn ambiguous requirements into functional prototypes

• Build quickly without creating an unmaintainable disaster

• Improve product quality, reliability, and performance

• Help shape the engineering culture and future team

• Speak with users and understand whether the product is actually helping them learn
  

You should be comfortable hearing:

“It works technically, but the child completed it in two seconds and learned nothing.”

And then rebuilding it properly.

What We Are Looking For

You may be a good fit if you:

• Have strong software engineering fundamentals

• Have built and shipped real products

• Can work across frontend and backend

• Are comfortable with ambiguity and rapid iteration

• Care about product experience, not just clean code

• Take ownership when things break

• Can communicate clearly with technical and non-technical teams

• Learn new tools quickly
  

Experience with some of the following is useful:

• React, Next.js, TypeScript

• Node.js or Python

• PostgreSQL, Firebase, Supabase, Redis

• Google Cloud, Docker, CI/CD

• Canvas, WebGL or Three.js

• LLM APIs, embeddings, RAG, analytics, or knowledge graphs
  

You do not need to know everything listed above. Nobody does, regardless of what their LinkedIn headline says.

Bonus Points

• Experience building games, simulations, or interactive products

• Experience in edtech, gaming, AI, or learning science

• Previous zero-to-one startup experience

• Strong side projects or open-source work

• Good product and design instincts

• A GitHub profile with more than abandoned tutorial repositories

Why Join SwaVid?

• Meaningful ownership and ESOPs

• Direct influence on product and technical decisions

• Challenging problems across AI, education, gaming, and cognitive science

• The opportunity to build systems used by real students

• No seven layers of management between you and a decision

• A front-row seat to building a company and engineering team from scratch

This Role May Not Be for You If

• You need every requirement to be perfectly defined

• You only want to work on one narrow part of the stack

• You prefer predictable work with limited ownership

• You believe “works on my machine” is a deployment strategy