Sr. Software Engineer I, Infrastructure

ABOUT KHAN ACADEMY

Khan Academy is a nonprofit with the mission to deliver a free, world-class education to anyone, anywhere. Our proven learning platform offers free, high-quality supplemental learning content and practice that cover Pre-K - 12th grade and early college core academic subjects, focusing on math and science. We have over 155 million registered learners globally and are committed to improving learning outcomes for students worldwide, focusing on learners in historically under-resourced communities.

OUR COMMUNITY 

Our students, teachers, and parents come from all walks of life, and so do we. Our team includes people from academia, traditional/non-traditional education, big tech companies, and tiny startups. We hire great people from diverse backgrounds and experiences because it makes our company stronger. We value diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging as necessary to achieve our mission and impact the communities we serve. We know that transforming education starts in-house with learning about ourselves and our colleagues. We strive to be world-class in investing in our people and commit to developing you as a professional.

THE ROLE

Currently we are focused on providing equitable solutions to historically under-resourced communities of learners and teachers, and guided by our Engineering Principles. On the infrastructure team, you might work on projects such as:

• Research, define, and implement metrics to measure our distributed system's cost, reliability and performance in order to keep our engineering teams focused on the most crucial work that will support millions of learners and teachers.
• Scale the infrastructure powering our LLM tutor Khanmigo to support millions of learners and teachers.
• Work across engineering teams and the broader organization to identify, define and promote engineering best practices around topics like incident management, observability, and error handling.
• Explore and implement chaos engineering principles into our testing processes.

We strive to build using technology that is best suited to solving problems for our learners. Currently, we build with GCP, Go, GraphQL, TypeScript, React & React Native, Redux and we adopt new technologies when they’ll help us better achieve our goals. At Khan, one of our values is “Cultivate Learning Mindsets”, so for us, it’s important that we’re working with all of our engineers to help match the right opportunity to the right individual, in order to ensure every engineer is operating at their “learning edge”.

You can read about our latest work on our Engineering Blog. A few highlights:

• How Khan Academy Successfully Handled 2.5x Traffic in a Week
• Where Go and GraphQL collide: Behind the curtain with genqlient
• Half a million lines of Go
• Why we switched to Airflow for pipeline orchestration
• Incremental Rewrites with GraphQL
• Go + Services = One Goliath Project

WHAT YOU BRING

• 5+ years of experience building and supporting highly scalable web services handling large volumes of requests per second, and working with distributed, eventually-consistent databases.
• Strong technical project management skills, as our Senior Software Engineers often lead projects.
• Strong communication, thoughtfulness, and desire to give and receive regular feedback.
• Experience building and maintaining complex software. You’ll join us in writing clean, maintainable software that solves hard problems. You’ll write testable, quality code. You’ll push the team and the mission forward with your contributions.
• Empathy for learners around the world. You love learning and are excited about helping others learn to love learning. You’re motivated to learn new things and share what you learn with the world.
• Proven cross-cultural competency skills demonstrating self-awareness, awareness of other, and the ability to adopt inclusive perspectives, attitudes, and behaviors to drive inclusion and belonging throughout the o