Backed by Y Combinator, Acadian Ventures, and Soma Capital, Arist is a text message learning platform helping Fortune 500 companies and large organizations — including DuPont, GE, and the State of California — create, deploy, and assess text message courses.

Our long-term vision is to deliver critical knowledge and training to anyone in the world, regardless of traditional learning barriers, one text message at a time.

What's a text message course?

A series of texts, images/GIFs, and interactive exercises/questions delivered over 5 to 30 days via SMS or WhatsApp. Backed by research from Stanford and Harvard, text message courses see ~10x the completion and satisfaction rates of other learning mediums.

In fact, we view text message courses as a brand-new content medium, with a variety of impactful use cases ranging from preventing misinformation to COVID-19 training in refugee camps to DEI training for startups.

Why text messages?

A majority of the world's population — including frontline employees, distributed teams, and remote audiences — has access to SMS and WhatsApp. Meanwhile, internet access is limited globally, making video courses inaccessible to over 3 billion people, including 30 million Americans.

As well, it can also take months to build a traditional workshop or video course, while text message courses can be built and deployed in a day — by one person — ensuring frictionless transfer of knowledge. Writers have to get to the point, so learners get the most valuable insights, concepts, and case studies.

The best part? 95% of people read a text within 3 minutes. As a result, we help create and deliver content employees love in a way that they will actually read and engage with. Don't take our word for it — try a text message course about text message courses here.

At Arist, we help leading organizations meet employees where they are by delivering learning via SMS, WhatsApp, Slack and Teams.

What you'll do:

• Build new user-facing features with scalable UI components
• Solve complex backend problems and build solutions within our messaging and scheduler system (core of our product)
• Work closely with founders, engineers, and designer to implement fast new feature concepts
• Specifically, you will help build out our product to be more enterprise ready to help leading organizations seamlessly deliver learning at-scale over Arist
  • New distribution capabilities for large enterprises to deliver learning at-scale, with confidence
  • Easier audience segmentation and dynamic user management based on attributes (across 50,000+ learners for some customers)
  • More advanced logic, with as simple a UI as possible, for our automations tool
  • New permissions and user flows for managing content and delivery in Arist across enterprise teams
  • Help users get more value from learner data in Arist, telling a clearer story of learning outcomes and business impact

Tech you will need to work with:

• Vue.js and Ruby on Rails (experience with both is preferred, not required)
• Linear, GitHub, Slack, Notion
• You will work with critical components of our messaging system, including Twilio and Microsoft Teams APIs, as well as LMS/LXP/HRIS APIs.

Great fit if you:

• Have been a founding engineer at an enterprise software company
• Deeply care about developing a product that cohesively provides value to customers and solves user needs effectively
• Consider yourself a fast problem solver and developer
• Are cautiously optimistic and pragmatic in approach to solving complex problems, despite several barriers
• Can effectively prioritize work to be most productive without heavy direction, as long as strategy and impact of work to the business is clear
• Can turn complex problems or needs into simple solutions, from both a technical design and user experience perspective
• Believes in the Arist mission and value of the product, and would be thrilled to help us grow

Arist is built on Ruby on Rails, Node.js, MongoDB, Vue.js, Express.js, and AWS. We use Twilio for message processing.