---
title: 'Founding Platform Eng Lead at Risely AI'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/founding-platform-eng-lead-risely-ai-san-francisco-d51mxc94gpv0'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-11'
---

# Founding Platform Eng Lead at Risely AI

- **Company:** Risely AI
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-05-11
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-11
- **Apply:** https://jobs.gem.com/risely-ai/am9icG9zdDqsxYI9qfvOEU9xcwdNGIZ0

## Job description

Founding Platform Engineering Lead

Location: Downtown San Francisco · in-person 5 days a week · reports directly to the CEO

Comp: $150-215K total cash (incl. variable) plus founding-level equity

Risely is building the agentic operating system for universities. We're live at some of the largest universities in the country and growing fast.

We're hiring our Founding Platform Lead. This is a player-coach role at the foundation of the company. You'll own and build the core platform that delivers end-to-end deployments to large universities at record speeds with excellent quality.

## What you'll own

- The platform that delivers in 4 weeks. Most companies in our space take 12 months to deliver an implementation. The platform you own compresses three things in parallel: the data layer against the customer's source systems, the agent configuration against their workflows, and the security and sync infrastructure each customer inherits. Today, a complex deployment can take us 10-12 weeks to get done, down from 12 months. Your job is to take it lower, and keep it there as the customer base grows from 10 to 40 to 400.
- The deployment automation. A pipeline of agents that does the work an engineering team would otherwise do manually for every customer. You own how they're designed, how they're evaluated, where humans stay in the loop, and how the next leap in deployment speed comes out of the same team.
- The security platform. Compliance, RBAC, encryption, audit trails, agent guardrails. You design the primitives once and own the security posture as we scale into the largest education systems in the country.
- The connector and data engineering strategy. Every customer brings a new source system, a new schema, a new data contract. You set the strategy for how Risely meets that complexity, and build the framework every new connector inherits.

## Who you are

- Systems thinker. You design at the level of the whole platform. You see dependencies before you change anything.
- Technically strategic. You solve hard business problems with platforms and systems. When a customer brings a new compliance requirement, a new data shape, or a new integration target, you design the abstraction that makes the next ten customers with the same problem ship on the platform you already built.
- Abstraction taste. You know which patterns deserve to become primitives. You know when to invest in the platform layer and when to leave a customer feature as bespoke code.
- Investment judgment. You know when to stop adding surface area and reinforce the platform underneath. You've made that call and you've been right.
- Master of many threads. You run several concurrent workstreams without dropping the ball on any of them and you’re able to keep the team posted on all threads at any time
- AI-native. You orchestrate Claude Code agents to multiply yourself. You ship more in a week as a one-person team than most companies ship in a month with five. As we grow into a small squad, you teach the same way of working.

## Experience

3-8 years of production engineering. You've built and operated systems at the level of the things we're hiring you to lead:

- Backend. Python and TypeScript in production. Postgres, schema design at scale, query performance under real load.
- Infrastructure. AWS or GCP, Kubernetes or equivalent, CDK preferred. You understand how to make the calls on cost, latency, blast radius, and failure modes.
- Data engineering. Large-scale data pipelines, ETL or ELT, real-time sync, schema evolution. You've integrated against third-party source systems (Salesforce, Workday, Banner, Snowflake, or comparable) and lived with the edge cases.
- Multi-tenant patterns. Tenant isolation, encryption at rest and in transit, RBAC, audit trails. You have a position on shared versus isolated infrastructure and per-customer cost accounting.
- LLMs and agents. You've built with leading foundation model APis, designed evaluation pipelines for non-deterministic systems, and shipped agent products to production. You have a working point of view on what an agent should own and where humans need to stay in the loop.

We weigh the work itself: what you've shipped, what you've owned, what broke and what you fixed.

Hunger and grit matter. You're the kind of engineer who goes out of their way to think about how a problem could be solved differently, and then ships the answer the next morning.

You're joining the founding team. The work, the pressure, and the equity are all founder-grade.

How to apply Apply here and email shahryar@risely.ai with a paragraph on why this role and why you.

## About Risely AI

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Risely AI builds AI digital workers for higher education that handle enrollment, advising, and advancement operations across campuses.
- **Entity Type**: Private startup (Y Combinator S25; funding stage not publicly disclosed)
- **Headquarters**: United States (specific city not publicly disclosed)
- **Founded**: Not publicly disclosed; part of the YC S25 batch (2025)
- **Founders**: Shahryar Abbasi (CEO & Co-founder), Sadia Saifuddin (CPTO & Co-founder)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: EdTech / AI agents for higher education
- **Target customers**: B2B — colleges, universities, R1 research institutions, and private universities; users include enrollment teams, academic advisors, advancement staff, and institutional leadership
- **Mission**: Transform education so its power reaches far more people. The company focuses on technology carrying administrative burden while people keep judgment, responsibility, and relationships. ([risely.ai/about](https://www.risely.ai/about))

## Products & Services
- **Enrollment Agent**: Triages inquiries by intent, pulls phone/email/CRM history into one view, and prompts counselors with next-best actions. Claims measurable enrollment lift in 43 days at one private university. ([risely.ai](https://www.risely.ai/))
- **Advisor Agent**: Flags at-risk students, drafts personalized outreach, and generates success plans inside SIS, LMS, and CRM systems. Cited as adding advisor capacity at a top R1 university. ([risely.ai](https://www.risely.ai/))
- **Advancement Agent**: Manages donor pipelines, identifies prospective donors from engagement signals, and drafts personalized stewardship at portfolio scale across thousands of donors. ([risely.ai](https://www.risely.ai/))
- **Platform / Intelligence Layer**: Unifies institutional systems, routes signals to specialist agents, and allows agents to share context with each other to deepen institutional intelligence. ([risely.ai](https://www.risely.ai/))

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total funding not publicly disclosed; company is YC-backed and describes itself as “well-funded.” Currently live at four schools, including R1 research universities and private U.S. colleges. ([linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/risely-ai), [risely.ai/careers/fde](https://risely.ai/careers/fde))
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Y Combinator (YC S25); customers include R1 universities and private colleges around the U.S. ([linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/risely-ai))
- **Growth Signals**: Deployment in as little as 6–12 weeks; no data migration required; claims an enrollment lift within 43 days at a private university; advisor capacity added at a top R1 university; advancement stewardship at portfolio scale. ([risely.ai](https://www.risely.ai/))

## Competitive Advantages
- **Agentic platform purpose-built for campuses**: Works inside existing SIS, LMS, CRM, advancement, and finance systems rather than requiring replacement or migration. ([risely.ai](https://www.risely.ai/))
- **Shared institutional context**: Agents pass context to one another, creating a compounding intelligence layer unique to each institution. ([risely.ai/about](https://www.risely.ai/about))
- **Fast, customer-specific deployment**: The company handles technical setup, integrations, policy configuration, and training, with go-live in 1–3 months depending on institution size. ([risely.ai](https://www.risely.ai/))
- **Outcome-focused positioning**: Uses real institutional data to model how retention lifts protect tuition and free up advisor time. ([risely.ai](https://www.risely.ai/))

## Strategic Focus
- Expand the number of deployed agents and institutions, with an emphasis on “agentic” institutions where software carries routine work from signal to completion.
- Continue building customer-specific agent workflows rather than generic solutions; the company states “generic agents lose; customer-specific agents win.”
- Push repeatable integrations and fixes back into the platform so future deployments become faster.
- Reinforce the mission of helping colleges survive a generational shift by improving retention and operational capacity. ([risely.ai/about](https://www.risely.ai/about), [risely.ai/careers/fde](https://risely.ai/careers/fde))

## Why Work Here
- **Small team, high ownership**: Roles like Forward Deployed Engineer own customer deployments end to end — from kickoff and data engineering to launch and training. ([risely.ai/careers/fde](https://risely.ai/careers/fde))
- **Fast impact**: Work reaches real users in days, not quarters. ([risely.ai/careers](https://www.risely.ai/careers))
- **Compensation and equity**: FDE role listed at $120–180K plus founding-level equity. ([risely.ai/careers/fde](https://risely.ai/careers/fde))
- **In-person culture**: The company emphasizes in-office presence and intense, fast-moving startup pace — including occasional evenings and Saturdays. ([risely.ai/careers/fde](https://risely.ai/careers/fde))
- **Meaningful technical challenges**: Engineers work with messy institutional data, privacy regulations, and legacy systems; the problems are hard and directly affect student retention and institutional survival.
- **Visa sponsorship**: Currently unable to sponsor work visas; applicants must be authorized to work in the U.S. ([risely.ai/careers/fde](https://risely.ai/careers/fde))

## Sources
1. [risely.ai](https://www.risely.ai/)
2. [risely.ai/about](https://www.risely.ai/about)
3. [risely.ai/careers](https://www.risely.ai/careers)
4. [risely.ai/careers/fde](https://risely.ai/careers/fde)
5. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/risely-ai)

## Other roles at Risely AI

- [Founder's Associate](https://feeny.ai/job/founder-s-associate-risely-ai-san-francisco-5y4kwpe4he7j) — San Francisco, CA
- [Forward Deployed Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-engineer-risely-ai-san-francisco-mpmh8q9vfb0h) — San Francisco, CA