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.
Khan Academy is looking for passionate software engineers to help learners around the world achieve their full potential. We’ve built a talented development team with engineers from a variety of backgrounds. We believe that the best way to provide impactful educational software 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, where you’ll get to work on hard problems at scale and grow professionally, all while making an impact.
About 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.
What you'll do:
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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
You may be a good fit if you have:
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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.
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Strong technical project management skills, as our Senior Software Engineers often lead projects.
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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.
About our benefits
We may be a non-profit, but we reward our talented team extremely well!
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Highly competitive salaries and annual bonuses
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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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Flexible work and time-off schedules to encourage work-family balance and holidays
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Great location: short walking distance to Caltrain and downtown Mountain View.
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Awesome team events, on-sites and off-sites, company parties and BBQs, and weekly board game nights
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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 improve real lives and the opportunity to work on high-impact software and programs that are already defining the future of education
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Affinity groups where parents, black and 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
Optional:
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Links to projects or previous work. We especially like living, breathing projects, demos, or commentaries on your work. Please don’t just send code – show or tell us why you wrote it, what it’s for, what you like about it, how it helps someone, etc. No project is too small if it’s something you care about. If you're feeling especially creative feel free to include a link to a project that you've built on our programming platform.
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If you’d like to provide a more traditional cover letter addressing your interest in KA (in addition to the diversity-based response), please feel free to attach that below.
To learn more about our work:
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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
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.