Founding Technical Director Job Northern Kentucky USA,Software Development

Founders School is a high school where teenagers build real, profitable companies. Not every student can afford to attend, and countless people outside that age range want to learn these skills. So we're building the first entrepreneurship simulation game, built with the IP of a business educator whose books have sold millions of copies.

We expect it to be played by hundreds of thousands of people, not just teenagers, within three years, and to become the canonical artifact of how to teach hard skills through play.

We need the person who builds the engine it runs on. You'll set the architecture for the platform every Founders School game runs on, write production code yourself, and run the coding agents that write most of the rest. Then the studio ships game after game on top of what you built.

The Role

You're the founding technical director of the simulation game platform. You report to Aviv Sheriff, our Simulation Game Director, and work closely with him. You set the architecture and own the infrastructure every game runs on.

This is an in-the-weeds super IC role on a small team of senior game developers. The team operates like a startup: diverse problems, few lanes, and room to expand your scope fast.

We use AI across the full game development pipeline, and we're unapologetically pro-business, pro-entrepreneurship and pro-wealth-creation. The platform you build should make both of those obvious to every player.

What you will be doing

In priority order:

The platform and simulation runtime. Own state, netcode, the simulation runtime and the architecture, built to support 100,000+ concurrent players. Keep production code at live-game quality.

AI-first authoring tools. Build the game-authoring engine so designers and artists can build, tune and ship simulations without an engineer. Optimize it for creative output and quality.

The development process. Own CI, guardrails and evals, and manage the coding agent fleet that writes most of our code, so anyone on the team can deploy safely at AI speed.

LLM orchestration and adaptive systems. Build the systems that let games learn and react to each player's progress and context.

Observability. Full visibility into player analytics, our own development workflows, and LLMs in production.

Simulation design. Co-design the game simulations with Aviv so they teach real skills.

What you will NOT be doing

Managing a big engineering org. You're a super IC on a small team. You direct agents more than people, and you write production code yourself.
Research. We're shipping a real product to real teenagers on a hard timeline. If it doesn't ship, it doesn't count.
Owning game direction or the look. Aviv owns game direction and the Art Director owns art. You co-design the simulations and build the tools both of them use.
Hand-writing every line. The agent fleet writes most of the code. Your job is the architecture, guardrails, evals and review that keep it at live-game quality.
Building one game. You're building the platform the studio ships game after game on. One-off code that can't be reused is a cost, not a win.

What this looks like in practice

Prototype to playtest. Aviv builds a new game mechanic in Claude over the weekend. On Monday you get it onto the platform, wire it into the simulation runtime and state, and put it behind the guardrails. By the end of the week, players are testing it.

Fixing the tool, not the level. A designer wants to rebuild and retune a simulation's economy. They do it in your authoring tools without filing a ticket. When they hit a wall, you fix the tool so the next designer never hits it.

Morning agent review. The agents opened a stack of PRs overnight. CI and evals catch most of the problems. You review the ones that touch architecture, reject…