About Coursera
Coursera was founded in 2012 by Stanford professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller to make world-class learning accessible to everyone, everywhere. Today, over 190 million learners and 375+ university and industry partners use our platform to gain skills in fields like AI, data science, technology, and business. As a Delaware public benefit corporation and Certified B Corp, we’re driven by the belief that learning can transform lives through learning.
Why Join Us
At Coursera, we’re looking for inventors, innovators, and lifelong learners ready to shape the future of education. You’ll help build global programs and tools that power online learning for millions turning bold ideas into real impact. People who thrive here are customer-first builders who move fast, simplify ruthlessly, and iterate relentlessly on the metrics that matter.
We’re a globally distributed team and let you choose the best way you work, whether it's from home, a Coursera hub, or a co-working space near you. Our virtual hiring and onboarding make it easy to join us and start making an impact from anywhere. If you’re ready to make a global impact, scale unique products exclusive to Coursera, and expand your career horizons, apply below.
Job Overview:
You will lead the engineering team for Coursera's Payments platform, overseeing the technology strategy, execution, and scaling of our checkout and payment systems for consumers. This role combines iterative product development with new project initiation, directly impacting Coursera's growth and mission to provide accessible education globally. You will manage the payments service architecture, API development, and data modeling, while collaborating with multiple teams and partners across the organization. Your responsibilities include technical leadership, architectural guidance, collaborating with other teams, and driving strategic initiatives to deliver scalable and innovative solutions that align with Coursera's goals. You will cultivate a culture of high performance and collaboration, ensuring operational excellence.
Responsibilities:- Building the Team: Partner with cross-functional stakeholders (Product, Data, Finance) to refine the team’s charter, ensure alignment with broader business goals, and support overall team health and growth.
- Mentoring: Act as a role model and coach for engineers. Conduct regular career development conversations, provide constructive feedback, and inspire engineers to achieve their best.
- Hiring: Identify key skill gaps and growth areas on the team. Drive the hiring pipeline by sourcing, interviewing, and onboarding talented engineers to build a well-rounded, high-performing team.
- Advising (Technical Leadership): Provide hands-on technical guidance to engineers as they design systems and tackle complex problems. Encourage sound architectural decisions and help team members grow into technical leaders in their product work.
- Product Enablement: In partnership with Product Management, curate a compelling vision for the payments platform including expanding our international payments strategy. Translate high-level product needs into an actionable engineering roadmap. Prioritize and drive key initiatives forward, run sprint planning and stand-ups, and ensure the team delivers with high quality on product and business goals in this critical area of the product.
- Platform Leadership: Balance building new features with managing tech debt to maintain a reliable, scalable platform. Evolve the payments platform for high leverage – architect systems and services that can accelerate multiple product initiatives across Coursera.
- Mediating: Foster an inclusive, collaborative team environment. Proactively address interpersonal issues and facilitate crucial conversations with empathy and fairness. Ensure every team member feels empowered, engaged, and comfortable sharing ideas and concerns.
Basic Qualifications:
- Education & Experience: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field, OR equivalent practical experience (e.g. 3+ years as a hands-on software engineer building web applications or distributed systems).
- Industry Experience: 5+ years in software product development or a related field, including prior experience leading engineering teams (2+ years in an engineering management role). You should have a proven track record of delivering software projects and managing cross-functional development teams.
- Technical Background: Strong software engineering foundation with experience in system design, data structures, and algorithms. (You should have professional coding/development experience in your background, even if this role is not an IC position.)
Preferred Qualifications:
- Leadership: Demonstrated integrity, transparency, and inspiration in your leadership style. Ability to empower and motivate a team to achieve ambitious goals.
- Emotional Intelligence: High degree of empathy, humility, and effective communication skills. Experience building inclusive team cultures and handling interpersonal dynamics with patience and tact.
- Problem Solving: Creative and analytical mindset with rigorous technical problem-solving skills. Ability to navigate complexity and guide the team to well-reasoned, innovative solutions.
- Thriving in Ambiguity: Excellence in driving clarity and results in ambiguous, complex situations. Boldness and grit to chart a path forward even when the way is not fully defined.
- Product & Platform Vision: Experience balancing rapid product feature delivery with long-term platform health. Proven ability to manage technical debt and invest in platform infrastructure that yields high leverage across multiple products or use cases.
- Platform Ownership: Experience managing a team that owns a product platform or critical infrastructure component. Ideally, you have firsthand experience defining the team’s charter and boundaries of ownership, especially in the context of evolving a new platform.
- Experience with Generative AI applications including prompt engineering and using APIs such as OpenAI, Claude, or Gemini.
- Scalable Systems Expertise: Demonstrated experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems, using modern backend technologies such as Java or Scala and API frameworks like GraphQL and gRPC. You understand how to design systems for high availability, performance, and maintainability at scale.
- Full-Stack Familiarity: Familiarity with modern frontend technologies (React, TypeScript, or similar) and how front-end interfaces integrate with backend services. While depth in one area (backend or frontend) is expected, the ability to understand and guide end-to-end system architecture is highly valued.
- Experience with payments systems, and with payments providers like Stripe, is a definite plus.
If this opportunity interests you, you might like these courses on Coursera:
- Generative AI for Everyone
- Generative AI Leadership and Strategy Specialization
- Learning how to learn
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Coursera is an Equal Opportunity Employer committed to building a welcoming and inclusive workplace. We consider all qualified applicants without regard to legally protected characteristics and provide reasonable accommodations upon request at [email protected]. Learn more in our CCPA Applicant Notice and GDPR Recruitment Notice.
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What We Do
Coursera was launched in 2012 by Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller with a mission to provide universal access to world-class learning. It is now one of the largest online learning platforms in the world, with 183 million registered learners as of June 30, 2025. Coursera partners with over 350 leading university and industry partners to offer a broad catalog of content and credentials, including courses, Specializations, Professional Certificates, and degrees. Coursera’s platform innovations enable instructors to deliver scalable, personalized, and verified learning experiences to their learners. Institutions worldwide rely on Coursera to upskill and reskill their employees, citizens, and students in high-demand fields such as GenAI, data science, technology, and business. Coursera is a Delaware public benefit corporation and a B Corp.
We’re a global platform aiming to transform lives through learning by offering transformative courses, certificates, and degrees that empower learners worldwide to advance their careers through skill mastery. We’re looking for inventors, innovators, and lifelong learners eager to shape the future of education. If you’re ready to build the global programs and tools that fuel the power of online learning, join Team Coursera.
Why Work With Us
People who thrive at here are customer-first builders who deeply understand our learners and partners, translate their needs into simple, high-impact solutions, and refuse to stop at “good enough.” They own outcomes end to end, move fast, simplify ruthlessly and iterate relentlessly on the metrics that matter to invent the future of learning.
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