Senior Software Engineer (Backend)

About Brilliant

Brilliant is making a world of great problem solvers. We focus on adults learning quantitative skills – especially in math, data, and CS/AI – and deliver a best-in-class interactive learning experience across web and apps. Our courses teach you what you need to know, while skipping the stuff you don’t – so expect more about solving equations, statistical analysis, logical deduction, neural networks, and generative AI, and less about abstract theorems and integrating complicated trig functions. 

We serve hundreds of thousands of paid subscribers, and we’re hoping you might be the right person to contribute to accelerating our footprint to millions of customers (and changed lives). In addition to what’s below, you can see all open roles and learn more about our team culture on our careers page.

We have always prioritized building a healthy business as the backbone of achieving our mission. We are default alive (will be profitable before needing to raise), have never had layoffs, are growing new customers at an exciting pace (high double-digits year-over-year). Our investors are top-tier + mission aligned, and we’ve kept our valuations tethered to reality – we aren’t playing “catch up” like many others.

In our day-to-day, we value adventure, excellence, generosity, and candor. We are optimists in the face of uncertainty, we take pride in our work, we go the extra mile for each other, and we tell it like it is (the good and the bad). We’re all here to do the best work of our lives together, and have a lot of fun along the way. 

We believe that real-time collaboration and human connection are necessary ingredients in building a high-velocity, creatively-oriented consumer product. We maintain core hours (10am - 3pm Pacific) where everyone is online, regardless of timezone. Over half of us are located near our hubs in SF and NYC, and folks outside of those cities travel to attend team offsites once-per-quarter.

The Role

Engineers at Brilliant work in small, elite teams alongside colleagues from Product, Design, and Data to achieve the best possible outcomes for our learners and our business. We’re opportunistically hiring exceptional engineers with a demonstrated history of transformative impact to further elevate the team.

Brilliant’s Lifecycle pod crafts and delivers the timely and delightful messages that our learners need to stay motivated. We run massive, high-volume experiments on the timing, frequency, and content of these messages to maximize their effectiveness.

Ensuring that the right users receive the right emails and push notifications with the right content at the right times is a surprisingly tricky technical challenge, and we’re hiring a product-minded, backend-focused software engineer to own the underlying technical system that powers this.

Responsibilities

• Own and evolve the technical systems powering tens of millions of emails and push notifications, helping millions of learners to stay motivated and achieve their goals.
• Develop deep expertise in the roles that tools like Braze, Snowflake, and Census play in tracking the billions of data points that inform which message a given user should receive.
• Bring new features from conception to completion across our entire stack. In a single sprint, you might instrument new analytics events across multiple platforms, architect a new recommendation engine, and trace a bug through our backend and multiple vendors.
• Be mindful of the “big picture” from both a technical perspective and a business one, keeping the Lifecycle pod on track in terms of “building the right thing” and “building the thing right”.
• Exercise a high degree of autonomy and technical authority on a team that trusts you to do what's right for our users but is there to support you when you need it.
• Contribute to a culture of excellence within your pod and the broader engineering team, setting high standards for candor and mutual accountability, and striking a careful balance between velocity and quality.

Who are you?

• You have at least 5 years of professional experience in software engineering with an emphasis on backend and data systems.
• You’re motivated by building robust and maintainable software systems that drive outcomes for users and the business, and you’re happiest when your software goes largely unnoticed (except for the praise from your peers) because of how reliable it is.
• You're capable of working across the stack, and you're most energized when owning feature implementations end-to-end.
• You're capable of working beyond our stack, integrating with third-party systems in thoughtful and intentional way.
• You believe in using the right tool for the job — even when it’s an unfamiliar one, and especially when it's a boring one.
• You enjoy solving technical challenges in a straightforward and maintainable way. You avoid introducing complex, novel, or "clever" solutions. You write code for humans, not for computers.
• Lack of prior experience with a specific technology is never disqualifying, but extensive experience with Django, GraphQL, Snowflake, Census, or Braze would help you hit the ground running.
• You're excited to collaborate closely with talented partners in Product, Data, Design, and Content. You enjoy solving problems with a cross-functional team and sharing knowledge. You want to grow and help the people around you grow.
• You have opinions about the emails and push notifications you receive from other products and companies. There are some that you like and some that you dislike, and you can articulate what makes them different.

Compensation and Benefits

We use a systematic compensation framework: salary scales are set each year for each job vertical, managers level folks on their team, and those levels are mapped directly to our compensation scales. A location-based adjustment is applied outside of SF and NYC (typically 5-10%) - feel free to ask us about your location!

Given the systematic approach, we always make First and Best offers - there is no negotiation (for new hires nor our existing teammates). This ensures people are paid based on their expected contribution, not their negotiation skills.

We offer top-notch health care plans, with 100% of the premiums covered for medical, dental, and vision for employees. About 1/3 of our team are parents, and we provide generous parental leave + up to $1900/mo in dependent healthcare coverage.

We offer flexible PTO, with a norm of taking off about 6 weeks per year (including federal holidays). We also provide home office equipment, a professional development stipend, and free food at our offices.

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