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.

Join the AI team at Arist, the leading enablement platform used by Novartis, HP, and Intuit. You’ll work alongside AI engineers and cofounders to scale the backend systems powering our AI agents — and help bring enterprise-grade intelligence to life through Rails.

What you’ll build:

• Production-grade APIs and backend infrastructure for AI-powered workflows
• Scalable Rails services with fast, clean code and strong test coverage
• Features that support AI agents, content pipelines, and real-time messaging
• Integrations with AI APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure)
• Systems that deliver dynamic learning through messaging and voice

We’re looking for someone who:

• Has 5+ years of hands-on experience with Rails 6+ or 7+
• Knows how to build clean, scalable APIs and database designs (PostgreSQL, Redis)
• Has deep knowledge of performance, caching, Sidekiq, and RSpec
• Has integrated LLM APIs and built agent-driven workflows (or wants to grow here)
• Understands prompt design, vector search, or LangChain-style orchestration
• Can document clearly, review thoroughly, and lead by example

Bonus if you’ve:

• Built AI-powered product features inside Rails apps
• Worked with vector DBs like Pinecone or Weaviate
• Used Python in AI contexts or built real-time features with WebSockets

The ideal candidate will be passionate about the intersection of traditional backend engineering and cutting-edge AI technologies, with a proven track record of building robust, scalable systems that leverage AI capabilities effectively.

If you’re a backend expert excited about enabling AI agents that actually ship and scale, we’d love to hear from you.

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