Product Engineer at AthenaHQ (San Francisco, CA)

AthenaHQ· San Francisco, CA· $140k–$200k·6d ago

Role details

Salary

$140k–$200k

Work type

Onsite

Employment

Full-Time

Job description

Mission:

We're looking for full stack Product Engineers to join our team building AthenaHQ, the leading platform powering global brands on AI Search.
We’re looking for an engineer who enjoys owning products
You'll work with the latest technologies, interface directly with customers, and have significant influence in defining our technical architecture and tooling decisions.
A typical day in the life includes iterating from customer feedback, scoping out new product features, and forward deployed to solving customer problems

Tech Stack:

Outcomes:

Competencies:

Bonus Points:

Culture highlights: Described as a team of “world-class talent from YC, Google, DeepMind, and Cohere” that includes former founders, D1 athletes, and future founders who “take pride in their craft.” Emphasis on high-agency, ambitious individuals.
Remote/hybrid/office policy: In-person at San Francisco headquarters. The company has two total offices and expects employees to work on-site.
Notable perks or engineering culture: Engineering team includes staff who “mass-deployed Claude Code agents to every corner of the codebase” and runs “daily sauna standups” — reflecting a quirky, high-intensity, AI-native engineering culture. Building at the cutting edge of how AI changes marketing and search.
For job seekers: 5 open roles posted (Product Engineer, Growth Engineer, Senior Product Designer, Founding Growth Marketer, Founding Product Marketer) indicating a fast-growing, early-stage environment where impact is immediate and cross-functional collaboration is key.

One-liner: AthenaHQ provides an AI Search Optimization (AEO/GEO) platform that helps brands monitor, analyze, and optimize their visibility across major AI-powered search engines and Large Language Models (LLMs).
Entity Type: Private (startup, backed by Y Combinator and FCVC)
Headquarters: San Francisco, California, USA
Founded: 2024
Founders: Andrew Yan (CEO), Alan Yao (CTO)

Primary industry/industries: Artificial Intelligence, SEO/AIO (AI Search Optimization), Marketing Technology (MarTech)
Target customers: B2B, enterprise marketing teams, and brands looking to manage their presence across AI search platforms (e.g., ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity, Claude, Grok)
Mission or purpose statement: “To help businesses thrive in the world of AI Search” — building the operating system for marketing teams in the era of AI-powered discovery.

AthenaHQ Platform (AEO/GEO Manager Command Center): A unified SaaS platform that provides cross-platform AI visibility tracking across 8+ LLMs, automated content optimization recommendations, competitive intelligence, citation analysis, and an executive dashboard with BI tool support (Tableau, Power BI, Looker). Includes the Athena Citation Engine (ACE) for oracle discrepancy detection.
Citation Engine (ACE): A feature for citation source analysis and link building, helping brands ensure their content is accurately cited by AI models.
Athena AI Agent: A content optimization agent that provides self-learning content improvement, on-page and off-page actions, and prompt/response analysis.
Athena Recommendation Engine: Delivers automated content optimization recommendations to improve AI search ranking.
API Access: Programmatic access to platform data and add-on credits for custom integrations.

Valuation/Market Cap: Not publicly disclosed (private startup)
Key Metric: Total funding not publicly disclosed; backed by Y Combinator (YC), FCVC (seed investor in Coinbase, Instacart, Webflow, Rippling), and angel investors including Eli Schwartz, as well as current and former CMOs.
Notable Investors/Partners: Y Combinator, FCVC, Eli Schwartz (author and SEO expert), featured in Forbes, WSJ, and Business Insider.
Growth Signals: Trusted by hundreds of next-gen marketing teams including Paperless Post, Ollie, Checkr, and OneSignal. The company is growing fast with active hiring for multiple roles. The founding team includes former Google Search PMs, DeepMind alumni, and engineers from Cohere, ServiceNow, and Voiceflow.

Founding team pedigree: Built by leaders from Google Search, DeepMind, and ServiceNow — deep domain expertise in how AI search works from the inside.
First-mover in AEO/GEO: One of the earliest dedicated platforms for AI Engine Optimization, a rapidly emerging category as brands realize traditional SEO is being disrupted by LLMs.
Multi-model coverage: Tracks brand mentions and visibility across 8+ major LLMs (ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Claude, Grok, Perplexity, etc.) in one unified dashboard.
End-to-end workflow: Covers monitoring, analysis, optimization, reporting, and competitive intelligence — an integrated platform rather than point solutions.
YC-backed pedigree: Strong startup brand and network effects from the Y Combinator ecosystem.

Current priorities: Scaling the engineering and GTM teams to capture the growing AI search optimization market; building the platform's AI agent capabilities; expanding enterprise customer base; deepening integrations with more LLMs and BI tools.
Growth direction: Becoming the "operating system" for marketing teams in the AI search era, moving beyond simple tracking to automated optimization and actionable intelligence.

Sources