Product / Growth Engineer (Working Student)

acemate is building an AI learning & teaching platform for higher and further education institutions. We have strong traction, secured funding and are entering an exciting growth phase. We're looking for a passionate Product Engineer (Working Student) to drive our product forward and help us scale.

About acemate

Founded in 2024, acemate has quickly become the leading AI learning platform for higher and further education, trusted by top-tier institutions across four countries, including University of Cologne, WHU and the German Chambers of Commerce and Industry (IHKs).

• Our Mission: Democratizing access to personalized learning. We don’t believe that AI will replace educators. Instead, we empower them to design and deliver personalized learning experiences at scale.
• Our Growth: We've raised pre-seed funding and are growing rapidly. While we focus on higher and further education today, we're already expanding into new regions and markets.
• Our Culture: We’re a young, driven team passionate about tackling the toughest challenges in education. We embrace builder culture and minimize scheduled meetings for ad-hoc discussions and maximized focus on coding and creating.

Meet the Team

• Antong (CEO): BCG, BMW & Antler background, leads business strategy, DJ by night

• Jan (CTO): NLP research, experience from SAP & N26, morning bike commuter

• Paul (CPO): Product expert with startup and education research background, devoted dog dad

• Emile (Fullstack): Ex-founder with product & AI background, ETH graduate, avid runner

• Anas (Fullstack): TypeScript specialist, functional programming enthusiast, chief photography officer

• Specialist in modern large-scale web architecture, escape room explorer

Tasks

What You'll Do

Your role is about solving problems for our users and owning the process of creation. As a Product Engineer (Working Student), you will bridge the gap between user needs, technical feasibility, and design while working closely with our founders.

Product Discovery & UX:

• Skip the lengthy specs: You’ll talk to users, spot the pain point, and jump straight into the code to build the solution.
• Prototype in Production: Why build a Figma mock when you can prompt a working UI in minutes? You will validate concepts by shipping working code, not static images.
• Intuition + Data: You’ll combine user empathy with real-time feedback (PostHog) to spot friction and fix it instantly.

Product Development:

• Own features end-to-end including architecture, development, and deployment.

• Build and refine AI-driven features that feel like magic, not like a chatbot wrapper.

• Embrace a "ship fast, learn faster" approach by releasing updates to gather user feedback and iterate based on data.

Examples from the past of what you might build:

• Duolingo-inspired daily quiz system to engage students with university content.
• Complex AI pipelines that extract textual and visual content from diverse documents and embed topics in knowledge graphs.
• Custom authorization engine to handle growing complexity across different institutional settings.

Tech Stack:

• Frontend: TypeScript, Next.js, Tailwind CSS
• Database: Supabase (PostgreSQL)
• Infrastructure: Cloudflare (Workers, Pages, Workflows, R2, KV), Google Cloud (Gemini, Cloud Run)
• Tools: Sentry, Langfuse, PostHog, Stripe

Don't worry if you're not familiar with everything from the start. We believe in your ability to learn fast and adapt to new frameworks and tools as we go.

Requirements

What We're Looking For

• Product Sense: You have a "gut feeling" for good UX/UI and can explain why a certain interface works or fails.
• User-First Mindset: You enjoy talking to users and translating their "issues" into solutions.
• Ownership mindset: You think like a founder and treat the product like it’s yours.
• Commitment to excellence: You’re driven to go above and beyond when it matters.
• Curiosity and adaptability: Eager to learn new technologies and stay open to innovation.
• Balanced AI approach: You knew how to code before Cursor and AI tools, but understand how to leverage them effectively.
• Availability: You’re enrolled at a university and available for at least the next 12 months.

Benefits

Benefits

• Working in a small but driven team built around performance and learning

• Flexible environment with high degree of autonomy and option to work remotely

• Frequent team events and acemate parties! 🥳