---
title: 'Full-Stack Software Engineer at Straia'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/full-stack-software-engineer-straia-san-francisco-dr44xnp3w9wm'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-08'
---

# Full-Stack Software Engineer at Straia

- **Company:** Straia
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-07-01
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-08
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/straia/d026e675-3b8b-40f4-8b98-def4aec83707

## Job description

## About Straia

At Straia https://www.straia.io/, we're building the AI-native intelligence layer for colleges and universities.

Today, colleges run on dozens of disconnected systems, forcing staff to spend hundreds of hours manually reconciling data, compiling reports, and tracking down insights. Straia changes that. We unify institutional data and layer on AI agents that answer questions, generate insights/visualizations, and automate repetitive workflows, transforming how colleges operate.

Over time, Straia will evolve into the core intelligence layer for institutional operations, where every function, from student advising to admissions to budgeting and resource planning, is supported by collaborative AI agents that understand each institution's unique data landscape.

We recently raised our pre-seed from a16z Speedrun, Reach Capital, and JFF Ventures, and are now hiring a Full Stack Engineer to help build the product that institutions use to interact with their data every day.

## The Role

As a Full Stack Engineer, you'll work across our entire stack with our CTO (Nikki https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikki-dansey-6ab66488/) and the rest of our engineering team — from the React frontend to the Node/TypeScript backend — to build the product surface where institutions interact with their data and AI agents.

This is a 0 → 1 opportunity to ship features end-to-end on a product that moves institutional data at scale, runs privately hosted frontier models, and delivers low-latency insights to non-technical users making real decisions about student outcomes.

You'll own meaningful chunks of the product from day one — designing, building, and shipping the interfaces and APIs that turn messy institutional data into clear, actionable answers. We move fast, keep the loop between idea and production short, and trust engineers to take real ownership of what they build.

We're looking for someone with high agency who's happiest shipping. The kind of engineer who picks up an ambiguous problem, drives it from blank page to production, and sweats the details that make a product feel great to use. If you thrive when expectations are high and the pace is fast, you'll feel right at home 🙂

## What You'll Do

- Ship features end-to-end — Own work across the whole stack, from the React + Vite frontend to the Node + Express + TypeScript backend. You'll take features from design through delivery and iteration, and you'll care about how they feel for the people using them.
- Build the AI agent experience — Create the interfaces and APIs where non-technical users ask questions and get back insights, visualizations, and automated workflows. You'll make AI feel like a natural, first-class part of the product.
- Connect the product to data and models — Wire the application layer up to our data stack (Postgres + DuckDB) and model inference, and keep query and inference latency low enough that the product feels instantaneous.
- Own your work end-to-end — You won't just pick up tickets. You'll scope, build, and ship features with real autonomy, make pragmatic calls under ambiguity, and take genuine ownership of the things you deliver.
- Build internal tooling and automations — Help build the leverage that lets a small team operate like one ten times its size, automating away the things that slow engineers down.
- Care about quality and resilience — Treat observability, testing, and fault tolerance as part of the job, not an afterthought. You build things that are easy to understand, debug, and recover.

## Who You Are

- Strong full-stack background — 4-6 years building and shipping production web applications across the stack, comfortable moving between frontend and backend in the same week.
- Fluent on the frontend — Solid experience with a modern frontend framework (React preferred) and an eye for building clean, intuitive interfaces for real users.
- Solid on the backend — Experienced building and operating production backend services and APIs, ideally in Node.js / TypeScript, with a good grasp of databases and data modeling.
- Comfortable with data — You've worked with relational databases and APIs in production. Experience with analytical or columnar databases (DuckDB, BigQuery) is a strong plus.
- Curious about AI integration — You don't need to be an ML engineer, but you're excited to integrate LLMs and models into a product and learn what makes inference reliable and fast at scale. Prior experience wrapping models or third-party APIs is a bonus.
- High agency — You take ownership, drive features from blank page to production, and don't wait to be told what to do next. You communicate your reasoning clearly and know when to move fast versus when to align first.
- Mission-driven — Excited about using technology to help universities make smarter, faster, more equitable decisions for their students.

## Our Stack

- Cloud: GCP managed via Pulumi
- Data Layer: Postgres + DuckDB
- LLM Inference: Privately Hosted Frontier Model on GCP, plus API integrations with GPT, Gemini, and Claude
- Backend: Node.js + Express + TypeScript
- Frontend: React + Vite

## Why Join Straia

- Be one of the first engineers at a venture-backed AI company redefining institutional intelligence in higher ed
- Ship product across the full stack — from AI agent experiences to the data and APIs behind them — and see your work in users' hands quickly
- Build the internal AI tooling that makes a small team absurdly productive. If you've ever wanted the mandate to automate everything that slows engineers down, this is it.
- Work directly with top-tier investors and advisors from a16z, Reach, and JFF Ventures
- Join a small, fast-moving team that works incredibly hard, ships fast, and still makes time for good food, laughs, and adventures. We take our work seriously, but not ourselves 🙂
- Build meaningful technology that directly impacts student success and equity across colleges nationwide

## What We Offer

- Compensation: $150K–$180K + equity
- Location: San Francisco (in office 4 days a week)
- Benefits: Health (platinum insurance), dental, and vision

## About Straia

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Straia is an agentic AI platform that unifies fragmented institutional data for higher education, enabling campus leaders to ask questions in plain English and get instant, actionable insights.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Pre-Seed)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA
- **Founded**: 2025
- **Founders**: Ryan Lau (CEO) and Alan Chan (CTO)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: EdTech, AI-powered Business Intelligence, Higher Education Technology
- **Target customers**: B2B; specifically U.S. colleges and universities (Presidents’ Offices, Provosts, Admissions, Enrollment Management, Student Advising, Institutional Research)
- **Mission or purpose statement**: To bring fragmented data together for fast, reliable insights across an institution, replacing legacy dashboards and manual reporting with an AI-native operating system.

## Products & Services
- **Straia Platform**: An agentic AI platform that connects directly to an institution’s core SIS, LMS, and CRM systems, creating a unified, AI-ready data layer. Users can ask questions in plain English to get instant insights on enrollment trends, retention risk, course performance, program health, equity gaps, and more. Built-in data governance ensures all PII and student records are encrypted at rest and in transit, with strict role-based access controls aligned with FERPA requirements.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed (early-stage startup)
- **Key Metric**: $4.5M committed Annual Recurring Revenue (cARR) in 4 weeks from launch; 8 employees as of April 2026
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: a16z Speedrun (lead), Reach Capital, JFF Ventures (pre-seed round)
- **Growth Signals**: Exited stealth in December 2025 with backing from top-tier EdTech investors; rapid early revenue traction ($4.5M cARR in 4 weeks); founders previously scaled an edtech startup to $5M in 9 months; active hiring for senior engineering roles in San Francisco.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Agentic AI, not just dashboards**: Unlike traditional BI tools that require technical expertise and rigid dashboards (used only by IR/IT), Straia lets any campus leader ask questions in natural language and get instant answers.
- **Deep institutional integration**: Connects SIS, LMS, and CRM data out of the box, solving the core fragmentation problem that plagues higher ed.
- **Built-in data governance & FERPA compliance**: Encryption, role-based access, and audit logging are core to the product, not an afterthought.
- **Founder-market fit**: CEO Ryan Lau spent a year speaking with institutional leaders across the U.S. and has a track record in edtech; CTO Alan Chan built the backbone of the systems. Both are deeply embedded in the problem space.

## Strategic Focus
- **Current priorities**: Scaling the platform to more colleges and universities; building out the engineering team (hiring Senior Platform Engineer and Senior Backend Engineer); deepening integrations with additional campus systems; maintaining rapid revenue growth while keeping a small, high-agency team.
- **Direction**: Becoming the “AI-native operating system for every college in America,” replacing legacy software across higher education with agentic AI.

## Why Work Here
- **High-agency, small team**: The company explicitly states they are “a small team of high-agency builders” obsessed with quality, clarity, and collaborative problem-solving. Impact per person is very high.
- **Mission-driven**: Directly helps improve student outcomes, retention, and equity in higher education — a meaningful social impact.
- **Cutting-edge tech**: Building an agentic AI platform at the intersection of AI, data unification, and natural language processing.
- **Location**: San Francisco, CA (roles listed as in-office/hybrid).
- **Founding team**: Led by repeat founders with deep domain expertise and strong investor backing (a16z, Reach Capital).
- **Early-stage growth**: Joining at the pre-seed stage with significant early revenue traction offers substantial ownership and career growth potential.

## Sources
1. [straia.io](https://www.straia.io/)
2. [straia.io/careers](https://www.straia.io/careers)
3. [tracxn.com](https://tracxn.com/d/companies/straia/__zsnxbgb_9mYUdVKZ_ujObXl0tQgJHgXazxXfdiG7_GA)
4. [speedrun.a16z.com](https://speedrun.a16z.com/companies/straia)
5. [edtechinnovationhub.com](https://www.edtechinnovationhub.com/news/edtech-startup-straia-exits-stealth-with-a16z-backing-to-tackle-higher-ed-data-gaps)

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