Fullstack Engineer

Pathfinder is building the financial rails for $1.5T of US education funds, a consumer card, powered by an AI eligibility model, that gives parents instant access to their education dollars (think "HSA card, but for education") while giving states automated AI fraud detection. As $900B of public education budget is put back in parents' hands and families sit on $600B in 529s with no good infrastructure to use it, Pathfinder unblocks the money.

The long-term vision is a three-step build: unblock choice funding to become the go-to place for families to navigate options to create more supply of educational options. The end goal is nothing less than a new education system. The team is the standout selling point, an unusual barbell where most are ex-founders and almost everyone has either run a school or run risk at a major fintech. Amaan (dropped out at 14; at 19 built the computer-vision system for the world's largest smart-warehousing company) and Sid (former homeschooler, 4th in the International Cyber Olympiad at 11, ex-Goldman quant) run the company; the team includes a founding engineer from MILA and Elon's SpaceX school, a Head of Risk who led risk at Mercury/Stripe/Circle, payments engineers from Microsoft and Goldman, Arizona's former ESA Deputy Director, and a GTM lead who co-founded Egypt's fintech superapp Khazna.

Pathfinder is in-person in San Francisco, flat, super-IC, and building "a bit of a cult" around genuine belief in the mission.

The Full Stack Engineer owns Pathfinder's parent-facing experiences (mobile. web) end to end, receipts, claims, reimbursements, statements, designed for clarity and trust, so a parent never wonders whether a reimbursement will go through, whether something's eligible, or what to do when they're lost. This is the person who owns the app, is comfortable with users day in and day out, and could be dropped in the middle of Arizona and figure out how to make the app better.

Customers are largely homeschool moms who aren't power users, so the goal isn't a slick-but-hard product, it's something so intuitive a parent gets in, clicks a few buttons, and leaves having saved time. Success is measured in parent output, not time-on-app. The founders are explicit on the shape: a strong engineer whose spike is product/UX and database sense, not a product manager (that's the trap). Database strength matters, not building from scratch so much as deeply understanding data modeling, latency, API-call patterns, and what/how to measure as the product and user base grow.

This role and the Payments role are two separate buckets (app vs. money-movement) that don't overlap much day to day.