Staff Full Stack / AI Engineer

Pocket Prep is a leading mobile and web-based learning platform offering efficient and affordable study solutions for professional certifications. We believe that education should be within everyone’s reach. Professional certification exams are often a stressful and expensive barrier to career advancement - Pocket Prep strives to prepare our members to pass with confidence.

The engineering team at Pocket Prep works alongside the product and design teams to develop the technical backbone of our applications. Engineering team members focus on their craft to provide high-quality, resilient, and accessible products that help studiers of all walks of life achieve their goals. We strive to continuously improve our processes, coding standards, and patterns both as individual engineers and as a team to ensure that we’re always ready for the next challenge. We are an efficient team that enjoys collaboration but also expects to contribute individually and autonomously based on the current project needs.

As a staff full stack engineer on the Platform team, you’ll play a key role in our research and development efforts by testing out new technologies and features. These early minimal viable products will allow our larger product team to consider and evaluate new possibilities for Pocket Prep, which in turn directly impacts the experience of students, educators, and partners around the world. Additionally, you will contribute to our core backend systems and ensure our current API and future endpoints fit well into the overall system architecture.

In this role, you won’t just write code — you’ll help shape the future of our platform. You’ll work closely with talented teammates across engineering, product, and design to define and rapidly iterate on rough ideas. Your work will likely touch every layer of our stack — making connections with both our Application and AI / ML servers and likely plugging the results into a current client or standing up a new test instance of a front end client.

As a staff member of the wider engineering team, you’ll also help guide technical direction through mentorship, thoughtful code review, and active participation in technical design sessions. You’ll be an advocate for best practices and contribute to long-term strategic decisions.

This is an ideal role for someone who is self-motivated, thrives on thoughtful problem-solving, and enjoys iterative learning & testing. If helping learners across the globe by experimenting with the latest technologies and our deep dataset motivates you, this is the role for you!

• Design and build working prototypes for new features such as exam readiness, content individualization and directed topic tutoring & learning

• Expand our knowledge and capabilities by continually monitoring, testing and benchmarking the rapidly evolving AI space

• Lead and contribute to technical planning by helping to define scope, evaluate complexity, and architect final solutions that grow out of R&D efforts

• Work closely with fellow engineers to align backend and frontend efforts, solve challenging problems, and ensure seamless cross-platform functionality

• Pitch in across the stack to ensure our many web & server clients are well reviewed during employee vacations and significant new releases

• Champion engineering excellence by evolving our internal standards, mentoring peers, and fostering a strong culture of code quality, collaboration, and continuous learning

We’re looking for someone who has the following:

Required:

• 8+ years of professional full stack experience, a majority w/ TypeScript and NodeJS

• Deep knowledge of TypeScript and functional programming patterns

• Proven integration and experimentation experience with machine learning

• Strong focus on code quality, testing, and documentation

Preferred:

• Experience delivering solutions in other languages, particularly Python

• Experience working with LLMs and custom embeddings

• Experience with MongoDB or other NoSQL databases

• Experience working on projects from ideation and inception through working prototype

• Prior involvement in mentoring or engineering leadership

And exhibits the following qualities:

• An engineer’s mindset - writing code that will stand the test of time and address the core problems, not just the symptoms

• A desire to collaborate with the team, knowledge share, mentor, and work together to find optimal solutions

• Comfortable being nimble and experimental throughout the course of product development; recognizing tradeoffs, making decisions and sharing the impact with stakeholders

• A love for continued learning individually and as a team, as well as making education more accessible for others

Pocket Prep is a leading mobile and web-based learning platform offering efficient and affordable study solutions for professional certification and licensure. We believe that education should be within everyone’s reach. High-stakes exams are often a stressful and expensive barrier to career advancement - Pocket Prep strives to prepare our members to pass with confidence.

We care about people passing exams because we’ve been there. Co-founders Ken Gillette and Peter Murphy faced expensive, high-stakes tests for career-promoting professional credentials while they were co-workers at Lockheed Martin. Like tens of thousands of other Americans, they shelled out hundreds of dollars to register and buy the materials they thought would improve their chances of passing. After hauling textbooks, flashcards, and study guides to costly test prep classes, they founded Pocket Prep in 2011 to help people more effectively and inexpensively prepare for important assessments.

Some of our employee benefits include:

• Stability: We're 12+ years old, 100% profitable without investor backing and we continue to have year-over-year growth.

• Work/Life Balance: Freedom to live your life while accomplishing something awesome for everyone in education. Flexible PTO and a 3-week company-wide holiday break from mid-December through the New Year.

• Competitive Compensation: Generous profit-sharing program and total compensation that targets the 75th percentile.

• 100% Healthcare: We cover all of our employees' healthcare premiums because we are invested in your well-being. We also cover 80% of dependents.

• Hybrid Flexibility: You can work where and when you are most effective. We have an office in downtown Durham, North Carolina, and are supportive of hybrid work options.

• Give Back: We are active participants in our communities through volunteer partnerships with local nonprofits. We offer VTO (volunteer time off) for independent engagement with your community.