Senior Front-End Engineer

Overview

Khan Academy is looking for passionate software engineers to help change education – join us on our mission to provide a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.

We’ve built a talented development team with engineers from a variety of backgrounds. Our team includes industry leaders from Google, Apple, Facebook, Mozilla, Pixar, and Intuit, as well as folks from tiny startups and developers from non-traditional backgrounds. Together, we’re a team that is deeply invested in your future. We believe that no organization will be as invested in developing you as a professional.

Currently, we’re hiring for a Senior Front-End Engineer to join our Coaching & Coached Learning (C&CL) team. The C&CL team works on creating new, impactful ways for teachers and students to use Khan Academy in the classroom. Products we’ve built include: assignments designed for the classroom, simple but powerful teacher reports, and new student practice mechanics. This fall, the C&CL team also helped design and build Learnstorm – an annual learning challenge that supports classroom teachers in developing their students’ growth mindset.

What you’ll do:

• Take on world-changing challenges guided by our Engineering Principles – some of which have never been solved before.
• Model problems, then design, write, test and release code to solve them!
• Collaborate with your peers via code reviews to level up yourself and others, to improve your ability to provide effective feedback, and to achieve higher quality code.
• Ship products with a cross-functional team of engineers, designers, analysts and product managers.
• Build using technology that is best suited to solving problems for our learners. Currently, we build with JavaScript, React, Redux, GraphQL, Python, and we adopt new technologies when they’ll help us better achieve our goals.
• Contribute to open source! We  open source, and we give back to the community whenever we can.
• Work on code that is used by millions of monthly active learners from all over the .

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

• Running A/B tests to make sure all our changes help people learn (not just increase page views)
• Designing tools to help us (and others) build accessible software
• Experimenting with new technologies to improve site performance

You need:

• Excitement about helping Khan Academy bring a free, world-class education to the world.
• 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.
• Eagerness to learn, educate, write code, and build products used by millions of learners and teachers.
• Experience with successful delivery and maintenance of 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.
• Strong communication, thoughtfulness, and desire to give and receive regular feedback- including the ability to work in tight-knit teams that flourish from communicating regularly.
• Strong desire to help define and implement development best practices across the organization.
• Experience breaking apart complex problems into tangible, understandable units – and then creating actionable solutions for each of them.
• An interest in mentoring other developers and interns: lifting them up, educating them, and finding ways for them to succeed.

You don’t need:

• We don’t require experience in any particular technology. Our commitment to on-boarding and mentorship means you won’t be left in the dark as you learn new technologies. That said, having knowledge of the standard JavaScript ecosystem (modern ECMAScript, Babel, ESLint, Webpack, along with React, Redux, etc.) would be a huge plus.

We offer the following benefits:

We may be a non-profit, but we reward our team well!

• The opportunity to improve real lives, solve hard problems, and change the world.
• Competitive salaries and annual bonuses.
• Ample paid time off as needed. We’ll support you in maintaining a healthy life-work balance.
• Delicious catered lunch every day, plus tons of snacks and beverages.
• An inclusive, excited, and friendly team that trusts you and gives you the freedom to be brilliant.
• A great location – we’re only 0.5 miles from the Caltrain and downtown Mountain View. We also pay for remote employees to fly out a few times a year, and our San Francisco dwellers are encouraged to work from home a few days a week to save the commute time.
• Awesome team events and weekly board game nights.
• Oh, and we offer all those other typical benefits as well: 401(k) + 4% matching & comprehensive insurance including medical, dental, vision, and life.

How to apply:

• Attach your resume below
• Address the following prompt in the space provided below: At Khan Academy, we believe that reaching all learners requires an engineering team that is diverse in every respect, and we are looking for individuals who will help us fulfill our mission by adding to the diversity of our team’s experiences, perspectives, and mindsets. With that in mind, tell us briefly how your experiences and perspectives— whether personal, professional, academic, or otherwise— could contribute to the diversity of our team.

Optional:

• Links to projects or previous work. We especially like living, breathing projects, demos, or commentaries on your work. Please don’t just send code – show or tell us why you wrote it, what it’s for, what you like about it, how it helps someone, etc. No project is too small if it’s something you care about. If you’re feeling especially creative feel free to include a link to a project that you’ve built on our programming platform.
• If you’d like to provide a more traditional cover letter addressing your interest in KA (in addition to the diversity-based response), please feel free to attach that below.

To learn more about our work:

• Our long term vision
• Our team
• What our learners have to say about Khan Academy

As an organization and as individuals, we are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, gender identity, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, pregnancy, medical conditions, genetic information, disability, or Veteran status. We strongly encourage all candidates to complete the EEOC questions below so that we can continue to monitor our processes and ensure we are creating an environment that allows candidates to feel comfortable and display their best selves across many lines of difference.