Staff Software Engineer, Web Foundations

About Quizlet:
Inspired by our belief that anyone can learn anything and powered by our own curiosity, we build the smartest tools we can imagine to help students learn.  
Quizlet is the popular, global learning platform and app that millions of students, teachers and everyday people use to study any subject imaginable for school, work or as part of their personal interests -- including two-thirds of high school students and half of all college students in the US. Combining cognitive science and machine learning, Quizlet guides students through adaptive study activities to confidently reach their learning goals.
Valued at $1 billion, Quizlet has raised over $60 million in venture capital from investors including Icon Ventures, Union Square Ventures, General Atlantic, Costanoa Ventures, Owl Ventures, and Altos Ventures.  
To serve our global community of learners, our teams tackle lofty technical challenges and design for use cases across cultures and languages. We work hard, act like owners, and collaborate every chance we get. We’re energized by the potential to power more learners through multiple approaches and various tools.

About the Team:
The Web Foundations team provides the tools, frameworks, and services that enable Quizlet’s developers to deliver world-class learning experiences to millions of users. We are a team of problem-solvers dedicated to improving developer productivity and maintaining high standards for quality across the organization.
About the Role:
This position is for a Staff Software Engineer who brings expertise in reliability, performance, scalability, and software engineering best practices. You will leverage your experience to help solve some of our hardest problems, model best practices, and drive learning and improvement across engineering teams while contributing to broader software development initiatives. You will collaborate with product and platform teams to build robust, scalable, and high-performing systems that support our products and services.
Our colocation work model supports employees both remotely and onsite each week.  Employees are required to be in the office on Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday and as needed by their manager or the company. This hybrid working environment facilitates collaboration, increases work efficiency, and enhances employee growth.

In this role, you will:

• Design, build, and maintain scalable and reliable software systems across various product and infrastructure domains
• Drive initiatives that improve system performance, reliability, efficiency, and maintainability, ensuring high-quality user experiences
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams, including Product Engineering and Platform Infrastructure, to develop robust architectural solutions
• Implement best practices for observability, performance optimization, and incident response
• Develop automation frameworks, deployment processes, and tooling to enhance engineering efficiency
• Contribute to large-scale engineering efforts by providing technical guidance and mentorship
• Partner across Product teams to refine and improve service-level objectives (SLOs) and key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitor system health
• Advocate for best practices in system design, testing, and operational excellence
• Lead blameless postmortems and continuously improve incident management processes

What you bring to the table:

• 7+ years of experience in software engineering, with a track record of delivering reliable and scalable systems.
• Strong coding proficiency in modern programming languages (e.g., Go, PHP, Python, JavaScript, Java, C#, etc.) and expertise in distributed systems.
• Experience designing and operating high-availability, high-scale systems.
• Familiarity with observability, incident response, and performance optimization techniques.
• Strong problem-solving skills with the ability to design and implement end-to-end solutions.
• Leadership and mentorship abilities to influence engineering teams and drive technical initiatives.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to explain technical concepts to diverse audiences.

Bonus points if you have:

• Experience implementing SRE principles in a general software engineering environment.
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes, Terraform, ArgoCD, GitHub Actions, or similar tooling.
• Familiarity with cloud infrastructure (Google Cloud, AWS, etc.) and modern DevOps practices.
• Background working in PHP and Go languages specifically.
• Experience in large-scale distributed systems and event-driven architectures.
• Passion for fostering a culture of reliability and continuous improvement.

Compensation, Benefits & Perks:

• Quizlet is an equal