What job did Steve Jobs hold at Atari before co-founding Apple?

Steve Jobs worked as a technician at Atari before co-founding Apple.

Jobs joined Atari in 1974, shortly after leaving Reed College and traveling in India. Atari was then a pioneering arcade-game company, best known for titles such as Pong. Jobs worked there on technical assignments and became associated with an early version of the arcade game Breakout.

According to accounts of the period, Atari founder Nolan Bushnell asked Jobs to build a game prototype, and Jobs sought help from Steve Wozniak. The project became the basis for Breakout, although later retellings differ over how much of the engineering work each person performed.

Jobs’s Atari employment is sometimes described as a game-design job, but “technician” is the standard title used in biographies. He left Atari before he and Wozniak founded Apple Computer in 1976, so Atari was an important pre-Apple chapter rather than an Apple business venture.