ABOUT KHAN ACADEMY
Khan Academy is a nonprofit organization 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, and right now we’re hard at work helping learners address any unfinished learning that the COVID-19 pandemic may have caused. We also know that not all communities have been impacted equally by this pandemic, which makes our work focusing on providing equitable solutions to historically under-resourced communities even more important.
WE ARE DRIVEN BY OUR COMMUNITY
Our students, teachers, and parents come from all walks of life and so do we. We are fun, diverse, quirky people that come from a variety of backgrounds. Our team includes people from academia and from high tech companies and tiny startups. We hire great people from diverse backgrounds and experiences, not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because it makes our company stronger. Valuing diversity, equity and inclusion is necessary for us to actualize our mission and truly impact the communities we serve. 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. We’re a hardworking team that’s passionate about helping learners and teachers around the globe! We strive to be world class in investing in our people and commit to developing you as a professional.
THE ROLE
As a Data Engineer at Khan Academy, you’ll help us gather and transform the data we need to create new, impactful ways for teachers and students to use online learning in the classroom. You’ll work with our efficacy research team to understand how learners build mastery and collaborate with our product analysts to gain insights that drive innovation and improvement. Ultimately, you'll be part of helping millions of learners around the world unlock their full potential.
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Take on world-changing challenges guided by our Engineering Principles – some of which have never been solved before.
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Model problems, then design, write, test and release code to solve them!
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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.
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Work closely with our Data Insights, Marketing, Philanthropy, and District Partnerships teams to deliver data-driven insights in service of our mission.
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Build out our data architecture using Google Pub/Sub and BigQuery, Apache Spark and Airflow, PostgreSQL and any other tools we need to provide data that is reliable and up-to-date.
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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:
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Why we switched to Airflow for pipeline orchestration
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Experimenting with new technologies to improve site performance
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Kotlin on the server at Khan Academy
WHAT YOU BRING
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At least 3 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.
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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.
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Strong communication, thoughtfulness, and desire to give and receive regular feedback
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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.
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Excitement about helping Khan Academy bring a free, world-class education to the world.
WE WELCOME
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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!
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Competitive salaries
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Ample paid time off as needed – we are about getting things done, not face time
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Generous parental leave
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A fun, high-caliber team that trusts you and gives you the freedom to be brilliant
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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
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Affinity groups where Parents, Black, Hispanic/Latino, Women and Gender Minorities, and LGBTQIA+ identified folks come together
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And we offer all those other typical benefits as well: 401(k) + 4% matching & comprehensive insurance including medical, dental, vision, and life
MORE ABOUT US
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Sal’s TED talk from 2011
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Sal’s TED talk from 2015
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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.