Learning Commons is Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s education initiative, which aims to scale proven teaching and learning practices to benefit every learner. Learning Commons became the name of our education efforts in 2025 to build on the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s work over the past decade to advance learning science and help translate that research into classroom practice.
At Learning Commons, we pair technology with grant making to scale proven teaching and learning practices to benefit every learner. We aim to translate what learning science tells us about how students learn best into classroom practice. With the advent of generative AI, that translation work can be accelerated and scaled to have a greater impact.
Our mission is to bring learning science into the tools used every day by teachers and students, ensuring that technology reflects the realities of classrooms and strengthens teaching and learning.
In today’s fragmented edtech landscape, school districts are often left piecing together products that don’t always align with curricula or instructional needs. While AI holds enormous potential to support educators, it can only deliver on that promise when grounded in research, high-quality educational data, and expert evaluation. That’s why we’re building open, public-purpose infrastructure — datasets, rubrics, and resources — that help raise the standard for educational tools and create more consistent, impactful learning experiences for all students and teachers.
The OpportunityAs a Senior Software Engineer, Data on the team, you will design, build, and scale software systems to help educators better address the myriad challenges they face. You will use research on the science of student learning and human development to design tools that help teachers connect with students and tailor learning experiences to individual student needs.
What You'll Do- Change Data Capture (CDC):
- Create new CDC pipelines to support the launch of new products.
- Collaborate with the infra team on improving the monitoring and scalability of the CDC pipelines.
- Triage and investigate Debezium or Kafka issues in collaboration with the infra team.
- Maintain key data pipelines
- Ingest external data sets for use by the team
- Improve data usability and data quality in our data warehouse
- Launch new ETL (extract, transform, load) processes in production
- Databricks & AWS:
- Set up roles & access permissions for Databricks, following best practices.
- Set up ETL pipelines or orchestration workflows within AWS & Databricks ecosystems.
- Data Curation:
- Collect and organize knowledge through various sources, maintaining and updating data to ensure accuracy.
- Transform, integrate, aggregate, annotate, and enrich data to enhance its value.
- Derive and continuously update student attributes for personalization use cases.
- Hands-on experience with AWS services and Kubernetes.
- Experience with Databricks / Spark ecosystem.
- Knowledge of CDC, Debezium, and Kafka.
- Experience in Software Engineering or Data Engineering
- Expertise in writing efficient and optimized SQL
- Experience with dimensional data modeling and schema design in a database or data warehouse
- Expertise with scripting languages such as Python
- Experience with ETL tooling such as Airflow
- Experience with large-scale cloud data warehouses such as Snowflake
- Passion for education and bringing technology to improve education
- Experience working with large data sets
- Love for collaborating and working with people in understanding data needs, as well as scoping and executing on projects.
The Redwood City, CA base pay range for a new hire in this role is $190,000 - $261,800. New hires are typically hired into the lower portion of the range, enabling employee growth in the range over time. Actual placement in range is based on job-related skills and experience, as evaluated throughout the interview process.
Better TogetherAs we grow, we’re excited to strengthen in-person connections and cultivate a collaborative, team-oriented environment. This role is a hybrid position requiring you to be onsite for at least 60% of the working month, approximately 3 days a week, with specific in-office days determined by the team’s manager. The exact schedule will be at the hiring manager's discretion and communicated during the interview process.
Benefits for the Whole YouWe’re thankful to have an incredible team behind our work. To honor their commitment, we offer a wide range of benefits to support the people who make all we do possible.
- Provides a generous employer match on employee 401(k) contributions to support planning for the future.
- Paid time off to volunteer at an organization of your choice.
- Funding for select family-forming benefits.
- Relocation support for employees who need assistance moving
If you’re interested in a role but your previous experience doesn’t perfectly align with each qualification in the job description, we still encourage you to apply as you may be the perfect fit for this or another role.
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What We Do
Learning Commons is the name of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s long-standing work and investment in education, which aims to scale proven teaching and learning practices to benefit every learner. Learning Commons builds on CZI's work over the past decade to advance learning science and help translate that research into classroom practice.
