---
title: 'Founding Growth at Pensive'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/founding-growth-pensive-san-francisco-78eg0gfmcdre'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-10'
---

# Founding Growth at Pensive

- **Company:** Pensive
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-09-01
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-10
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/pensive/f3846493-f863-41a8-a898-e555900053cd

## Job description

## About Builders

Every star athlete has an agency. [Builders](https://builders.cv/) represents exceptional builders and connects them with startups that match their ambition. We work with top Seed–Series F startups, including Ramp, Greptile, Poetic, and Blockit, to place exceptional talent across every function, from engineering to operations.

## Your Role

You'll be our first growth hire, owning growth for the entire Builders platform. Builders is a two-sided marketplace: candidates on one side, companies on the other. Growth on one side compounds the other. Your job is to find the loops that make that flywheel spin, then build the systems that keep it spinning. What you'll own:

- Signature campaigns. Launching creative campaigns that would attract builders ([past campaign](https://exceptional.builders/)).
- Referral loops. Design and ship a referral program engineered for virality.
- In-person community. Host events that make Builders the room where the top talent want to be: dinners, demo nights, hackathons.
- Social Media/Brand awareness. Grow Builders' social media presence and run campaigns that make "represented by Builders" a status symbol.
- Conferences. Show up where builders and founders gather, and turn presence into pipeline for both sides of the marketplace.

## Who You Are

- High agency. You don't wait for permission. You spot what needs doing, claim it, and own it end to end.
- First-principles thinker. You reason from hypotheses, not playbooks. You'd rather test a weird idea that fits our thesis than only copy what worked somewhere else.
- Technical. You can contribute directly to the Builders product: building the tools your own campaigns need to succeed, rather than waiting on engineering team bandwidth.
- Creative. You find original angles. If a channel is crowded, you invent a new one.
- Analytical. You scope projects by projected ROI with clear KPI targets, and you prioritize with data as well as intuition. You know when to kill an experiment.
- Social. You genuinely enjoy hosting. You can fill a room with builders and make every one of them glad they came.

## About Pensive

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Pensive provides an AI-powered grading and tutoring platform for STEM courses at colleges and universities, automating assessment creation, grading, and personalized student feedback.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed stage)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2024 (implied by funding timeline and early milestones)
- **Founders**: Yoonseok Yang (CEO, Co-founder), MinJune Kim (CTO, Co-founder)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Educational Technology (EdTech), specifically AI in higher education
- **Target customers**: B2B – colleges, universities, and individual instructors teaching STEM courses (e.g., computer science, engineering, math)
- **Mission or purpose statement**: To transform teaching and learning at scale by providing instructor-led AI tools that save time on grading and deliver richer, more personalized feedback to students.

## Products & Services
- **Pensive AI Grader**: AI-powered grading assistant that creates rubrics, grades assignments 10x faster, and provides personalized feedback to students. Designed for large STEM courses.
- **Pensive AI Tutor**: A scalable small-group tutoring system that uses AI to facilitate tutoring sessions, demonstrated in a paper accepted at SIGCSE 2025.
- **Pensive Discuss**: A research-driven tool (presented at SIGCSE 2025) enabling scalable small-group CS tutoring with AI.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total funding of $6.8M–$6.9M (Seed Round led by Mayfield Fund, closed ~February 2026). Includes a prior Grant led by WGU Labs.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Mayfield Fund (lead), Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Reach Capital, Bass Investment, Anti Fund, WGU Labs. Partnership with Anthropic (for AI models).
- **Growth Signals**: 1,000+ instructors across 100+ institutions (as of Feb 2026); 64% of workforce in the US with small teams in Philippines and South Korea; cited by top institutions like Columbia University and UC Berkeley; paper accepted at SIGCSE 2025; active presence at ASEE 2025 conference.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Instructor-led AI**: Unlike fully automated grading tools, Pensive emphasizes instructor control and oversight, reducing concerns about cheating and academic integrity.
- **STEM specialization**: Deep focus on STEM courses (CS, engineering, math) where grading is complex and time-consuming.
- **Research-backed**: Academic papers at top conferences (SIGCSE) validate their approach and pedagogy.
- **Partnership with Anthropic**: Leverages cutting-edge AI models (likely Claude) for robust and reliable feedback.

## Strategic Focus
- **Scaling adoption**: Expanding beyond early-adopter institutions into broader higher education markets.
- **Product depth**: Enhancing the AI grader and tutor with richer feedback capabilities and new features.
- **Sales & GTM**: Hiring Founding Account Executives to drive enterprise sales to universities and colleges.
- **International growth**: Presence in South Korea and Philippines signals potential expansion into Asia.

## Why Work Here
- **High-impact mission**: Directly improve the experience of millions of college students and free up instructors from tedious grading work.
- **Tight-knit, early-stage team**: ~10 employees, offering significant ownership and influence for early hires.
- **Remote-friendly location**: HQ in San Francisco (1 Brady Street, Suite A-725) with hybrid flexibility implied by distributed team (US, Philippines, South Korea).
- **Competitive compensation**: Salary ranges for open roles are $135K–$300K (estimated), typical for well-funded Bay Area startups.
- **Strong investor backing**: Backed by top-tier VCs (a16z, Sequoia, Mayfield) and a partnership with Anthropic, providing stability and resources.
- **Culture of innovation**: Active in academic research and conferences, encouraging a learning-oriented engineering culture.

## Sources
1. [pensive.com - Careers Page](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/pensive)
2. [CB Insights - Pensive Company Profile](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/pensive)
3. [LinkedIn - Pensive Company Page](https://www.linkedin.com/company/pensiveai)
4. [Basin - Pensive Open Roles & Salary Data](https://basin.cv/companies/pensive)
5. [pensive.com - Terms of Service](https://www.pensive.com/schools/terms-of-service)

## Other roles at Pensive

- [Growth Intern (Fall 2026)](https://feeny.ai/job/growth-intern-fall-2026-pensive-san-francisco-mmc1h692mete) — San Francisco, CA
- [Talent Sourcer (Contract)](https://feeny.ai/job/talent-sourcer-contract-pensive-remote-hcmyez11s9gf)
- [Founding Technical Recruiter](https://feeny.ai/job/founding-technical-recruiter-pensive-san-francisco-fbvxnc70r7w8) — San Francisco, CA
- [Product Designer](https://feeny.ai/job/product-designer-pensive-san-francisco-phwm6fq1e7sb) — San Francisco, CA
- [Software Engineer, Product](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-product-pensive-san-francisco-081fw41xkvx7) — San Francisco, CA
- [Founding Growth](https://feeny.ai/job/founding-growth-converge-new-york-35gepv269v3s) — New York, NY
- [Founding Growth](https://feeny.ai/job/founding-growth-ajax-new-york-vyxfqghjrfkb) — New York, NY
- [Founding Growth](https://feeny.ai/job/founding-growth-revin-new-york-pbtbsk8q77g6) — New York, NY
- [Founding Growth](https://feeny.ai/job/founding-growth-terac-san-francisco-veszzcrjxm7e) — San Francisco, CA
- [Founding Growth](https://feeny.ai/job/founding-growth-confido-new-york-h8ezmtzw7vnr) — New York, NY