Senior Software Engineer – Data Infrastructure at Khan Academy

Title: Senior Software Engineer – Data Infrastructure

• Location: Mountain View, CA / Remote friendly (US + Canada)

About Khan Academy

Khan Academy is a nonprofit on a mission to provide a free, world-class education to anyone, anywhere. We already reach millions of students every month and are growing rapidly. We’re building a library of high-quality instructional and practice resources that empowers learners and the teachers who support them. Whether they’re studying metaphors, mitosis, Marbury v. Madison, or multivariable calculus, we want to offer students the resources to realize that they can learn anything.

Khan Academy is looking for passionate software engineers to help change the world. We’ve built a talented development team with engineers from a variety of backgrounds. We believe that the best way to provide impactful education is to create a diverse team of people from different backgrounds, races, religions, genders, sexual orientations, ages, and experiences. Together, we’re a team that is deeply invested in your future. We believe that no other organization will be as invested in developing you as a professional.

About the Role

As an Engineer at Khan Academy, you’ll help learners build mastery regardless of where they are, and regardless of whether they are accessing Khan on the browser, on Android, or on iOS. You’ll create new, impactful ways for teachers and students to use online learning in the classroom. You’ll work on the content creation and translation tools that we rely on to expand our library of world-class educational content and bring it to an international audience. You’ll help build cutting-edge infrastructure to enable students of all backgrounds to succeed on high-stakes assessments like the SAT and LSAT. Ultimately, you’ll be part of helping millions of learners around the world unlock their full potential.

What you’ll do:

• Take on world-changing challenges guided by our Engineering Principles some of which have never been solved before.
• Model problems, then design, write, test and release code to solve them!
• Collaborate with your peers via code reviews to level up yourself and others, to improve your ability to provide effective feedback, and to achieve higher quality code.
• Work closely with our Data Insights, Marketing, Philanthropy, and District Partnerships teams to deliver data-driven insights in service of our mission.
• Build out our data architecture using Google Pub/Sub, BigQuery, and Dataflow, Apache Airflow, PostgreSQL and any other tools we need to provide data that is reliable and up-to-date
• Contribute to open source! We open source, and we give back to the community whenever we can.

You can read about our latest work on our Engineering Blog. A few highlights:

• New data pipeline management platform at Khan Academy
• Experimenting with new technologies to improve site performance
• Kotlin on the server at Khan Academy

You may be a good fit if you have:

• At least 5 years of experience building backend infrastructure such as databases, data warehouses, pipelines, and services. Experience with cloud infrastructure and Google Cloud in particular is a plus.
• Strong technical project management skills, as our Senior Software Engineers often lead projects.
• Experience building and maintaining complex software. You’ll join us in writing clean, maintainable software that solves hard problems. You’ll build test and monitoring frameworks to verify the accuracy and integrity of our data. You’ll push the team and the mission forward with your contributions.
• Strong communication, thoughtfulness, and desire to give and receive regular feedback
• Empathy for learners around the world. You love learning and are excited about helping others learn to love learning. You’re motivated to learn new things and share what you learn with the world
• Excitement about helping Khan Academy bring a free, world-class education to the world.

We welcome:

• Candidates with experience in any and all technologies. We don’t require experience in any particular language or tool. Our commitment to on-boarding and mentorship means you won’t be left in the dark as you learn new technologies.

About our benefits

We may be a non-profit, but we reward our talented team extremely well!

• Highly competitive salaries and annual bonuses
• Ample paid time off as needed we are about getting things done, not face time
• Generous parental leave
• Flexible work and time-off schedules to encourage work-family balance and holidays
• Delicious catered lunch daily plus lots of snacks and beverages
• Great location: short walking distance to Caltrain and downtown Mountain View.
• Awesome team events, on-sites and off-sites, company parties and BBQs, and weekly board game nights
• A fun, high-caliber team that trusts you and gives you the freedom to be brilliant
• The ability to improve real lives and the opportunity to work on high-impact software and programs that are already defining the future of education
• Affinity groups where parents, Black and Latinx, women and gender minorities, and LGBT+ identified folks support one another
• And we offer all those other typical benefits as well: 401(k) + 4% matching & comprehensive insurance including medical, dental, vision, and life

How to apply:

• Attach your resume to the job posting on our Khan Careers page
• Briefly describe your experience building backend web services that deal with large volumes of requests per second.
• Address the following prompt in the space provided below: We believe that reaching all learners requires a team that is diverse in every respect, and we are looking for individuals who will help us fulfill our mission by adding to the diversity of our team’s experiences, perspectives, and mindsets. With that in mind, tell us briefly how your experiences and perspectives – whether personal, professional, academic, or in your own classroom – would contribute to the diversity of our team and our ability to understand and address the needs of all learners.