Founding GTM Engineer

Founding GTM Engineer

Location: San Francisco, CA or Phoenix, AZ (In-Office)

Partnership: EQL Tech has been exclusively retained by a high-growth technology startup to appoint a mission-critical Founding GTM Engineer to join their team.

About the Company & The Mission

EQL Tech is proud to represent a highly ambitious, well-funded startup that has raised $16M from top tier VCs and angels. The company is building the financial rails to help families access new State education funds (known as ESAs or School Choice Funds).

The $900B US Public Education budget is being opened up for parents to take control of their portion, which averages $7.5k per kid per year. Ambitious homeschool parents are already using these funds to piece together their dream education experience. Helping them access these funds is Step 1 in the journey to build the next-gen education system. The company treats this as their life's work and has already rejected an acquisition offer because they care about this being done right.

The Team

You will be joining an in-person company, working together in the office.

• The Founders: The founders are engineers who have run their own alternative school together. One previously worked as a Quant at Goldman Sachs , and the other built the computer vision system for the largest smart warehousing company globally, serving 1M customers/day at age 19.

• The Core Team: You will work alongside top talent, including a founding engineer who did AI research at MILA and at Elon Musk’s SpaceX school , a Head of Risk from Mercury, Stripe, and Circle , and a Payments Engineer from Microsoft and Goldman Sachs. The team also includes the former Deputy Director at Arizona's ESA department and leading school choice advocates.

The Role: Founding GTM Lead

As the founding GTM engineer, you will build the consumer growth engine from scratch; spreading awareness of school choice and the frictionless product experience being built. This is a high-ownership, high-impact founding role working directly alongside the co-founders.

As GTM Engineer, you will:

• Understand the Parent Psyche: Spend real time with parents to understand what drives trust, what triggers adoption, and what causes drop-off, then turn that into concrete GTM decisions.
• Architect Acquisition Loops: Build community-led acquisition loops across homeschool co-ops, special needs groups, micro-influencers, local networks, and education pods.
• Design Trust-Based Referrals: Design referral incentives that actually work and feel aligned with the intimacy of education decisions rather than transactional.
• Operate Like an Engineer: Set up tight feedback loops, instrument funnels, and run rapid experiments.
• Collaborate & Iterate: Regularly collaborate with the co-founders, engineers, educators, government, and parents. You will be closely involved in family visits and engaging with government agencies in order to iterate and improve the product experience.

Your Profile

• Advanced Data Analytics: You like living in the data-funnels, cohorts, retention, activation, conversion - and you can go deep to translate insights into work that changes the curve.
• High-Output & Resourceful: You are scrappy and high-output; you don’t need a big team or a big budget. You can leverage our product and user base as resources at your disposal.
• Agile Decision Making: You are fast, precise, and decisive. You can form a view with incomplete information, then update quickly.
• Strategic Intuition & Trust Building: You have strong intuition to tell which communities matter, which events are worth it, and which partnerships are signal vs. noise. You respect trust, knowing ESA spending is high-stakes, and families need clarity and confidence.
• Mobility & Field Execution: You "get on the plane". You know the value of in-person interactions and you’re doing the work on the ground that makes the metrics move.

Commitment, Compensation & Benefits

This will be a big commitment and we’re aiming high. It needs to be something you are energised about taking on or this isn’t the team for you.

• Generous Founding Equity: We compensate you well with equity.

• Top-Tier Backing: We’ve raised $16M from top tier VCs and angels.
• Relocation Support: You are willing to relocate to San Francisco, CA or Phoenix, AZ and travel to visit customers. We’re an in-person company and are in the office together.
• Comprehensive Visa Sponsorship: If you do not have a visa, we can support you.
• Unmatched Impact: The rare opportunity to directly shape how the $900B US Public Education budget is being opened up for parents to take control of their portion (avg. $7.5k/kid/year)