Senior Software Engineer, Infrastructure

THE ROLE

Currently we are focused on providing equitable solutions to historically under-resourced communities of learners and teachers, and guided by our Engineering Principles. On our infrastructure team, we currently have 2 open roles. Both are Senior Fullstack/Infrastructure focused in general, but specifically one role is focused on Security and the other on Reliability.

For Reliability:

• Research, define, and implement metrics to measure our distributed system's cost, reliability and performance in order to keep our engineering teams focused on the most crucial work that will support millions of learners and teachers.

• Enhance system observability by providing tools and dashboards for our engineering teams.

• Work across engineering teams and the broader organization to identify, define and promote engineering best practices around topics like incident management process, logging, and error handling.

• Explore and implement chaos engineering principles into our testing processes.

For Security: 

• Work with other software engineers in all parts of the organization to address security issues.

• Resolve security bugs in the Khan Academy web application.

• Build new features to support security goals.

• Help where needed. Bring your own creativity to both solutions you implement and new ideas to improve Khan Academy’s security posture.

• Collaborate with our infrastructure teams, legal team, community support team, and community volunteers.

• Configure security tools to better protect or inform us.

• Connect with pentesters, auditors, and other external partners as part of our regular security assessment program.

We strive to build using technology that is best suited to solving problems for our learners. Currently, we build with Go, GraphQL, JavaScript, React & React Native, Redux and we adopt new technologies when they’ll help us better achieve our goals. At Khan, one of our values is “Cultivate Learning Mindsets”, so for us, it’s important that we’re working with all of our engineers to help match the right opportunity to the right individual, in order to ensure every engineer is operating at their “learning edge”.

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

• How Khan Academy Successfully Handled 2.5x Traffic in a Week

• Where Go and GraphQL collide: Behind the curtain with genqlient

• Half a million lines of Go

• Why we switched to Airflow for pipeline orchestration

• Incremental Rewrites with GraphQL

• Go + Services = One Goliath Project

WHAT YOU BRING

• 5+ years of experience building and supporting highly scalable web services handling large volumes of requests per second, and working with distributed, eventually-consistent databases.

• Strong technical project management skills, as our Senior Software Engineers often lead projects.

• Strong communication, thoughtfulness, and desire to give and receive regular feedback

• Experience building and maintaining complex software. You’ll join us in writing clean, maintainable software that solves hard problems. You’ll write testable, quality code. You’ll push the team and the mission forward with your contributions.

• 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.

PERKS AND BENEFITS

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

• Competitive salaries and annual bonuses

• Ample paid time off as needed – we are about getting things done, not face time

• Generous parental leave

• A fun, high-caliber team that trusts you and gives you the freedom to be brilliant

• The ability to put your talents towards a deeply meaningful mission and the opportunity to work on high-impact products that are already defining the future of education

• Affinity groups where Parents, Black, Hispanic/Latino, Women and Gender Minorities, and LGBTQIA+ identified folks come together

• And we offer all those other typical benefits as well: 401(k) + 4% matching & comprehensive insurance including medical, dental, vision, and life

At Khan Academy we are committed to fair and equitable compensation practices, the well-being of our employees, and our Khan community. This belief is why we have built out a robust Total Rewards package that includes competitive base salaries, and extensive benefits and perks to support physical, mental, and financial well-being.

For this position, our hiring salary range is $146k -185k USD. This is determined by several factors including experience and skills, regular job market evaluations, and location. In an effort to maintain competitive market rates, these ranges reflect the minimum and maximum targets across all locations.For more information, your recruiter can share more about the salary range for your desired location. 

MORE ABOUT US

• Sal’s TED talk from 2011

• Sal’s TED talk from 2015

• Our team

OUR COMPANY VALUES

Live & breathe learners

We deeply understand and empathize with our users. We leverage user insights, research, and experience to build content, products, services, and experiences that our users trust and love. Our success is defined by the success of our learners and educators.

Take a stand

As a company, we have conviction in our aspirational point of view of how education will evolve. The work we do is in service to moving towards that point of view. However, we also listen, learn and flex in the face of new data, and commit to evolving this point of view as the industry and our users evolve.

Embrace diverse perspectives

We are a diverse community. We seek out and embrace a diversity of voices, perspectives and life experiences leading to stronger, more inclusive teams and better outcomes. As individuals, we are committed to bringing up tough topics and leaning into different points of view with curiosity. We actively listen, learn and collaborate to gain a shared understanding. When a decision is made, we commit to moving forward as a united team.

Work responsibly and sustainably

We understand that achieving our audacious mission is a marathon, so we set realistic timelines and we focus on delivery that also links to the bigger picture. As a non-profit, we are supported by the generosity of donors as well as strategic partners, and understand our responsibility to our finite resources. We spend every dollar as though it were our own. We are responsible for the impact we have on the world and to each other. We ensure our team and company stay healthy and financially sustainable.

Bring out the joy

We are committed to making learning a joyful process. This informs what we build for our users and the culture we co-create with our teammates, partners and donors.

Cultivate learning mindset

We believe in the power of growth for learners and for ourselves. We constantly learn and teach to improve our offerings, ourselves, and our organization. We learn from our mistakes and aren’t afraid to fail. We don't let past failures or successes stop us from taking future bold action and achieving our goals.

Deliver wow

We insist on high standards and deliver delightful, effective end-to-end experiences that our users can rely on. We choose to focus on fewer things — each of which aligns to our ambitious vision — so we can deliver high-quality experiences that accelerate positive measurable learning with our strategic partners.

We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, or Veteran status.