Five tracks, one super-track, one seat. Fully remote, daily founder access, an honest answer at week twelve. We are bringing in one founding intern — not to staff a queue of tickets we do not have, but to live inside the loop for twelve weeks, ship something the program will keep using, and decide, alongside us, whether they want to be the next founding engineer.
School of Quest is a program — not an app, not a coaching shop — built for the kind of student who is bored by the school they are in. We run intake conversations, psychometric reads, hand-built quest spines, live Dojo sessions, instructor coaching, parent loops, and an Observatory that watches the whole machine and tries to make it better. The codebase is the program’s nervous system.
This isa working apprenticeship inside an unusual operating company. You will sit in on real morning standups, read real instructor session transcripts, watch a real student’s intake, and ship code into the system that the next student walks into.
This is not a competitive-programming course, a structured bootcamp, or a ticket-shop. There is no curriculum. There is a loop, a mission, a track, a mentor, and you.
Pick a track at the end of week two, after spending two days inside each. The Polymath track is offered, not requested — by founder invitation only.
Where School of Quest meets the open web — the doorway, the brochure, the first feeling.
What you own: The marketing site, the application funnel, public quest showcases, the program’s voice on the open web.
Stack: Next.js · CMS · copy · motion
Thrives if you love: Type, narrative, conversion, the first impression.
The student rooms and the facilitator’s AI workbench. Where the program is actually practised.
What you own: The full set of student rooms — Northstar, Quests, Dojo, Labs, Slice of Life, Hero Wall, Failure Lab, Signal Deck, Story Builder, Journaling, Essay Coach, HOSM, Conversations — plus the facilitator’s Avira Studio AIs (Terra, Isilon, SoQratic) and the Drops authoring system.
Stack: React · Tailwind · LLM prompts · MCP · UX
Thrives if you love: Pedagogy, interaction design, AI as a coach.
The program looking at itself — the place where every Dojo session becomes legible.
What you own: Transcript and video pipelines, OpenRouter synthesis, clips, reels, session replay, and the path to Constellations (cross-session synthesis).
Stack: Node worker · ffmpeg · Anthropic caching · rrweb
Thrives if you love: Inference quality, evals, media plumbing, prompts.
The unglamorous bedrock. The reason nothing has fallen over.
What you own: Prisma schema integrity, Clerk auth, the worker, deploy hygiene, the parent and instructor surfaces, and observability.
Stack: Postgres · Prisma · PM2 · self-hosted
Thrives if you love: Boring code that does not break, FK audits, ops.
The super-track. For the rare candidate who would be wasted in any single one.
What you own: All four tracks, plus a cross-cutting capstone the program could not otherwise ship. By founder invitation only, after week two.
Stack: Everything above
Thrives if you love: Doing the work nobody asked for and being right.
The cadence is designed so that you are never starved of feedback for more than a week, and never asked to ship something to a real student without a senior set of eyes on it.
Async morning standup (written, three lines: yesterday, today, blockers). Live morning founders’ standup — invited, not required to speak.
30-minute 1:1 with a founder. Friday written reflection — you journal the way the students journal. Live code review on Thursday.
10-minute demo to the full team on Friday. One mission reading and a 200-word response — a Quest Spine, an instructor note, a parent essay.
Field trip — sit in on a live Dojo or intake session, then write your own Observatory-style synthesis of what you saw. Non-negotiable.
| When | What | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Week 1 — Arrival | Boot the entire stack on your machine. | Postgres, Clerk in test mode, the Next.js app, the WS server, the Observatory worker, ffmpeg. Read the codebase end-to-end. Sit in on three founder standups. Open one tiny PR — a seed-script polish, an admin UI nit. Goal: end the week with one merged commit and a written tour of the loop in your own words. |
| Week 2 — Orientation | Pick your track. Or be invited to Polymath. | Spend two days inside each track. By Friday, write a one-page memo to a founder on which track you want and why. The Polymath track is offered, not requested — by founder invitation only, at the end of week two. |
| Weeks 3–4 — Contained ship | A scoped, finishable feature inside your track. | Pair on the design with a founder. Land the migration if there is one. Run the FK audit. Demo it at the week-four biweekly. The point is not the feature; the point is to learn how this team ships. |
| Weeks 5–8 — Owned project | A medium project you DRI. | You scope it. You write the design doc. You ship it. A founder reviews twice a week, intervenes only when you ask or when you are about to break a parent’s account. Halfway through, a founder runs an honest mid-cohort review — what you would be hired for today, what you would not be. |
| Week 8 — Capstone scoping | Write the capstone doc. | Three pages: what you are building, what success looks like, what you are explicitly not doing. Reviewed by a founder before you write a line of code. |
| Weeks 9–11 — Capstone | Ship the thing. | This is the body of work the offer letter will reference. Real users where possible. Real measurement. Real safety review. Real polish. |
| Week 12 — Hardening & demo | Type-check, test, document, present. | A one-hour demo to the team. A written self-review against the rubric. A founder-written outcome letter — offer, redirect, or honest no — delivered before Friday. |
Evaluation runs continuously, not at the end. The rubric below is the one used in any full-time offer that follows.
| Dimension | What it means here |
|---|---|
| Taste | You ship things a parent would screenshot. You refuse to ship things you would not want said to your own child. |
| Loop literacy | You can describe what happens to a student between intake and Constellations without looking at the code. |
| Schema instinct | You add a Prisma relation and immediately ask what the user-purge contract does with it. You write a migration, never a schema-push for keepers. |
| AI judgment | You treat prompts as code. You eval them. You know when a model is wrong even when it sounds confident. |
| Shipping | You finish things. The thing in production is more like the thing you scoped in week eight than not. |
| Voice | You write the way the program speaks — to students, to parents, in PRs. Plain, warm, unflashy, exact. |
| Independence | You unblock yourself. You ask the right questions. You do not need to be checked on every day. |
The program is small. The codebase is unusual. The mentorship is generous. The work is real. If three of those four sentences are exciting to you, apply.
One link to something you have made. A 400-word note on which track and what you would ship as the capstone. One real question for a founder. We respond within seven days from a person.
