Coursera was launched in 2012 by Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller with a mission to provide universal access to world-class learning. Today, it is one of the largest online learning platforms in the world, with 191 million registered learners as of September 30, 2025. Coursera partners with over 375 leading universities and industry partners to offer a broad catalogue of content and credentials, including courses, Specializations, Professional Certificates, and degrees. Coursera’s platform innovations — including generative AI-powered features like Coach, Role Play, and Course Builder, and role-based solutions like Skills Tracks — enable instructors, partners, and companies to deliver scalable, personalized, and verified learning. Institutions worldwide rely on Coursera to upskill and reskill their employees, students, and citizens in high-demand fields such as GenAI, data science, technology, and business, while learners globally turn to Coursera to master the skills they need to advance their careers. 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.
At Coursera, we are committed to building a globally diverse team and are thrilled to extend employment opportunities to individuals in any country where we have a legal entity. We require candidates to possess eligible working rights and have a compatible timezone overlap with their team to facilitate seamless collaboration.
Coursera has a commitment to enabling flexibility and workspace choices for employees. Our interviews and onboarding are entirely virtual, providing a smooth and efficient experience for our candidates. As an employee, we enable you to select your main way of working, whether it's from home, one of our offices or hubs, or a co-working space near you.
Job Overview:
As a Backend Developer, you’ll have a real opportunity to innovate, productize, and iterate at start-up speed. In this role, you’ll take up significant technical ownership for Coursera in these areas: service architecture, product API development, data modeling, and more. Our backend developers mostly work with modern Java (16+), MySQL, DynamoDB, gRPC, GraphQL (DGS), Kafka, and more within a microservices architecture.
Responsibilities:
Design and implement scalable systems and infrastructures
Measure your work thoroughly, analyze results, and generate hypotheses to drive new product changes through A/B testing
Setup monitoring and testing of your APIs and services to better understand real time health of your products
Basic Qualifications:
5+ years of experience working in a relevant software engineering role
Expertise in designing highly-scalable and performant micro-services and storage layers using common frameworks, languages, and infrastructure (e.g. Java, Play/Scala, MySql, Cassandra, Solr, Kafka)
Comfortable working in a fast-moving team environment (we deploy many times a day!)
Data-driven and strongly motivated by success and learnings through experiments and metrics analysis
If this opportunity interests you, you might like these courses on Coursera:
Object Oriented Java Programming: Data Structures and Beyond Specialization
Object Oriented Programming in Java Specialization
Introduction to Programming with Python and Java Specialization
Functional Programming in Scala Specialization
Compensation
US Zone 1: This role is not available in Zone 1
US Zone 2: From $150,800 to $188,500
US Zone 3: This role is not available in Zone 3
US Zone 4: This role is not available in Zone 4
The range(s) listed above is the expected annual base salary for this role, subject to change.
Salary is just one component of Coursera’s total rewards package. All regular employees are also eligible for a bonus program and equity in the form of RSU’s.
A number of factors are taken into account when determining pay, which includes: job level, location, training/education, business need, skill set and internal equity.
Current Zone Locations:
Compensation for this role is location-based using four U.S. pay zones:
US-Z1: San Francisco Bay Area
- US-Z2: NYC and Seattle Metro
- US-Z3: California (outside of SF Bay Area), Colorado, Connecticut, Washington DC, Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maryland, NY/NJ (other than NYC), Oregon, Rhode Island, Texas, Virginia, Washington (other than Seattle)
- US-Z4: Alaska, Arizona, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Wisconsin
Base pay aligns to your zone and will also reflect your experience and role level. Your recruiter will confirm your zone and the applicable range early in the process; we disclose pay ranges where required.
Top Skills
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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