Forward Deployed Engineer, Routines

About Athena

Athena () pairs world‑class leaders with elite executive assistants. It’s where some of the most powerful partnerships in the world get built.

Our clients are founders, executives, and leaders whose ambition exceeds their time. Athena is the first company to build a human‑in‑the‑loop executive support system, combining trained Executive Assistants with market‑leading AI to help them stay organized, follow through on priorities, and operate at their highest level.

Athena is one of the largest companies in this category, with 3,000+ clients and over $100M in annual run rate. Our clients include Uber, Shopify, and Goldman Sachs.

We are fully global, working across time zones and cultures. Joining Athena means creating something that fundamentally changes how people live and work and brings extraordinary achievement within reach.

We’re looking for people who take their work seriously and want to get better at it.

You should be thoughtful in how you approach problems, willing to take ownership, and able to follow through without constant direction. You ask questions when something doesn’t make sense, and you care about getting the details right.

You should be comfortable working with people who have high expectations and limited time. That means being clear, responsive, and reliable.

We’re also looking for people who are interested in how this role is changing. The way work gets done is in flux between people, systems, and AI. We want people who are curious about that and willing to adapt as technology evolves.

You don’t need to know everything on day one, but you should be able to learn quickly and apply what you learn.

Routines are Athena AI’s product for standing procedures: an Executive Assistant adopts a curated outcome once, grants bounded authority, sets a schedule, and Athena runs it going forward without custom workflow building. A Routine is really a workflow built out of underlying processes and skills, and building or polishing a good workflow and skill is often the harder, less obvious part of the job.

Routines are the heartbeat of daily engagement with Athena AI.

The Forward Deployed Engineer, Routines will work directly with Athena's clients and XPs to configure, customize, and troubleshoot Routines so they fit each client’s real workflow -- then turn what’s learned into better templates and product improvements. This role sits between individual client problems and the Athena AI and Routines roadmap, and requires a technical/product background, hands‑on experience building AI automations, the empathy to quickly understand what a client actually needs, and enough product judgment to know when a one‑off fix should become a template.

• Partner Directly with Clients and XPs:
  Work one‑on‑one to configure, test, and troubleshoot Routines against each client’s real workflows, tools, escalation rules, and edge cases.
• Help XPs Build and Polish Their Own
  
  Skills:
  
  Work hands‑on with XPs to develop and refine the individual skills they need, so those skills can be used by the Athena AI agent or plugged into a Routine wherever applicable.
• Customize and Extend Routines for Real Cases:
  When a stock template doesn’t fit, build the custom skill, integration, or tool that makes it work, then judge whether it belongs in the core product.
• Curate What Graduates into a Template:
  When a client‑specific build proves valuable, decide whether it should become a reusable template or client‑archetype variant, and shape what that first version looks like – in partnership with product and engineering.
• Strengthen the Core Routine Set:
  Contribute to the pre‑installed Routines every EA should have running from day one such as Morning Brief, Inbox Sweep, Calendar Audit, Travel Dossier, Meeting Prep Pack, and what comes next.
• Turn Onboarding into Routines:
  Embed with the onboarding team, learn how clients and EAs get ramped up today, and automate and productize that process inside Athena.
• Feed the Product
  
  Roadmap:
  
  Bring recurring client pain points, failure patterns, and feature requests back to the Routines product team as clear, prioritized requirements.

• Exper…