Forward-Deployed
Engineering Lead

Why this role

Palantir built its business on a philosophical idea: ontology. The proposition that when you model a business and its unique world as objects, links, and actions, scattered data becomes coordinated work. But "a society uncertain of what it believes cannot tell its engineers what is worth building." [source]

Lightning Studios builds ontologies for the wisdom economy: universities, museums, libraries, publishers, religious communities, foundations, and independent thinkers. Each holds a particular judgment about what matters and whom it serves. A general-purpose model lacks that judgment, and further, the alignment to ensure what is built is worth building. As intelligence gets cheaper, wisdom becomes the ultimate alpha.

We map an institution's world, work closely with its stewards, and turn what we learn into meaningful software powering transformation for learners and organizations alike.

Our Ecosystem

Our partners sit at the vanguard of cultural stewardship: prominent museums, major library collections, educational foundations, advocacy organizations, and leaders shaping the future of character, faith, and intellectual tradition. We synthesize these institutional breakthroughs into our own suite of interconnected educational products and experiences.

What We Build

Every engagement begins by excavating an institution’s tacit world, distilling its underlying corpus and fundamental values into an explicit ontology and graph of meaning. From this foundation, we construct in two kinetic directions:

• Outward: Interactive Knowledge. Conversational, AI-native, interactive learning products: from libraries that a reader can actively interrogate, to dialectical study partners that walk alongside a mind working through a dense text, to immersive mastery-learning journeys, and more.
• Inward: Ethos. An institutional operating system designed to bridge the gap between an organization’s stated values and how its people actually inhabit their days, aligning implicit culture with explicit action. We build AI-native operating systems that empower wisdom economy leaders to build transformative products for themselves and their end users.

Our long-term ambition is to reshape lifelong learning for millions around the globe through an interconnected suite of transformative learning products and experiences.

The Role

As Forward-Deployed Engineering Lead at Lightning Studios, you will turn institutional knowledge and ambitious ideas into software people can use. You will own the hands-on engineering work across client engagements, from an initial architecture through implementation, deployment, and iteration.

You will work closely with the founding team. You will contribute to early sales conversations and shape the initial architecture, then carry projects forward, contribute your own technical judgment, and own the details that make delivery succeed end-to-end. You will be a trusted technical partner to clients throughout the build.

To date, we have proven our approach by crafting bespoke intelligence engines for individual clients: ingesting, structuring, and resolving their distinct knowledge domains. Your mandate is to ship these systems reliably, then turn the patterns that recur into reusable components and better ways of building.

You will join as a full-time member of a small, mission-driven team, working side-by-side with the founders, designers, engineers, and institutional partners. As the work grows, you will coordinate additional engineering support and help shape our delivery capability.

Remaining a builder at heart, you will spend the majority of your time building and shipping across our active client pipeline. You will pair the curiosity to understand an unfamiliar institution with the practical judgment to scope a useful solution, make tradeoffs, and see it through.

What You Will Do

• Own Delivery End to End: Take client projects from initial architecture and prototypes to reliable, finished systems. Own implementation, testing, deployment, and iteration; surface risks early and follow through on the details that make the product work.
• Build with Uncompromising Conviction: Bring the deep conviction that software is a vehicle for purpose. Build technology that serves the transmission of character, culture, and human depth, with the care and rigor that real users deserve.
• Work Closely with Institutional Stewards: Listen carefully to scholars, curators, and organizational leaders. Clarify what they need, translate ambiguity into a useful scope, lead implementation conversations, and explain progress and tradeoffs with clarity and warmth.
• Bridge Meaning to Action: Work across data, AI, backend systems, integrations, and user-facing experiences to turn philosophical intent and organizational strategy into useful products. Collaborate with the founders and designers to define scope and ship within it.
• Productize Tacit Knowledge: Build systems that render an institution’s distributed wisdom explicit, allowing AI models to work with grounded domain context. Connect sources, schemas, retrieval, and interfaces with attention to permissions, provenance, and evaluation.
• Strengthen How We Build: Turn repeated delivery patterns into reusable tools, components, and agent-assisted workflows. Coordinate additional engineers and specialists as needed, review their work, and hold a high bar for quality while staying close to the code.

In Your First Year, You Will

• Earn Trust Through Delivery: Take ownership of active partner engagements and ship useful systems through clear milestones, reliable follow-through, and close collaboration with the people using them.
• Master Forward-Deployed Delivery: Become the day-to-day technical owner clients can rely on, leading implementation conversations and resolving problems while keeping Alex and the founding team aligned on architecture and priorities.
• Make Each Engagement Compound: Capture reusable patterns from client work to strengthen our shared technical foundations and inform products such as Ethos. Build for the needs we can see, with the judgment to recognize what should become reusable.
• Grow Our Engineering Capability: Coordinate additional engineering support as demand grows, establish practical standards for testing, security, provenance, and evaluation, and help future teammates become effective quickly.

What You Bring

• Technical Depth, Practical Breadth: You have depth in at least one relevant area and the ability to work across the rest—from data and infrastructure to backend systems and frontend experiences. You have shipped software people depend on and can learn unfamiliar tools and domains quickly.
• A Record of Building and Owning: You have taken ambiguous problems from idea to working product and can explain the decisions you made along the way. Experience as a forward-deployed engineer, early startup engineer, technical lead, or founder is especially relevant; demonstrated ownership matters more than a particular title or pedigree.
• AI-Native Building Fluency: You use AI coding tools and agentic workflows to accelerate real engineering work, with the judgment to inspect the result, test its behavior, and know when to change course. Experience with LLM applications, retrieval, knowledge graphs, or ontology-driven systems is valuable; curiosity and the ability to learn are essential.
• Rigor About Provenance: You care deeply about source quality, data lineage, permissions, and evaluation. You design grounded systems whose outputs can be traced to evidence, and you make uncertainty and limitations visible.
• High-Empathy Translation: You operate with warmth, intellectual humility, and low ego. Your primary collaborators will be scholars, curators, foundation presidents, and spiritual leaders. You possess the rare ability to translate their implicit domain wisdom into computational schemas—and explain complex software back to them with clarity and reverence.
• Driven by Serious Ideas: You care deeply about what is worth preserving. You believe the institutions safeguarding human culture, faith, and character deserve access to the world’s most powerful technological capabilities.

Who You’ll Join

• Zohar Atkins, Founder & CEO: Philosopher, Rabbi, and Rhodes Scholar who has cultivated a devoted global following for his writing on philosophy, theology, and culture.
• Alex Jakubowski, Co-Founder & COO: Serial founder, operator, and award-winning educator with a background in Classics.
• Bobby George, Co-Founder & Chief Design Officer: Co-founder of Montessorium (acquired by Higher Ground), former key design lead who helped scale Microsoft Flip to 100 million users, and PhD in Philosophy.

You will work alongside a lean team of mission-driven engineers and advisors committed to building the infrastructure for human wisdom, including Phil Galebach, Will Galebach, and Samuel Mensah-Bonsu.

Incubated by Infinity Constellation, Lightning has raised over $2M to date from strategic angels and venture firms, including Exponential Capital and Talok Capital.

What You’ll Get Out of It

You’ll have meaningful ownership of the work you ship, direct access to the founders, and room for your responsibilities to grow as Lightning grows.

• Base Salary: Competitive salary based on location, experience, skills, and market conditions. We will discuss the full compensation package during the interview process.
• Equity: Meaningful equity participation in Lightning’s long-term success, with the package aligned to the role and your experience.
• Bonus: Performance-based bonuses available.
• Workplace Flexibility: Unlimited paid time off (PTO) and fully remote flexibility with adaptable work hours.
• Health Benefits: Health coverage and benefits appropriate to your location, with details discussed during the interview process.
• Retirement & Financial: Retirement and financial benefits vary by location and employment arrangement; we will discuss the applicable options during the interview process.