Senior AI Engineer, Khan Academy
Literacy, 24 Months Fixed Term
$137.9-147k
More information about location
Nonprofit online education platform
Open for applications
Nonprofit online education platform
1001+ employees
Open for applications
$137.9-147k
More information about location
1001+ employees
Company mission
Khan Academy's mission is to provide a free, world‑class education for anyone, anywhere.
Role
Who you are
- Technical Proficiency: You have experience working in software engineering, data science, or related technical roles. Experience with python and/or go preferred
- Applied AI experience: You understand what generative AI models are good at and how to elicit the best performance from them. You have a knack for structured, analytical thought, and you’re detail-oriented with high standards for quality. You understand techniques—including prompt chaining, RAG, tool-calling, and fine-tuning—for guiding generative AI outputs in service of a robust and performant enterprise product
- Project management skills: Strong technical project management skills, as our Senior Software Engineers often lead projects that involve multiple engineers
- Testing and quality assurance: You’re committed to a careful, iterative, data-driven approach for optimization, innovation, and continuous experimentation. You have experience developing evaluation data sets for benchmarking model fit and task-specific performance
- Data Analysis: You know how to analyze interaction data, both programmatically and manually, to identify actionable insights to optimize the user experience. You have experience using data to inform strategic decisions
- Research: You keep informed about developments in AI and take an active interest in emerging research and industry trends, and you understand the implications for our product’s competitiveness and performance
- Communication: Your strong communication skills help you collaborate effectively with cross-functional teams, including educators, developers, and designers. You can explain technical concepts and create high quality documentation
- Collaboration: You have a history of working cross-functionally to achieve shared success in organization-wide goals and projects
- Growth mindset: You’re adaptable to a fast-paced environment, and open to learning new tools and tech
- Ethical Considerations and Bias Mitigation: You’re aware of ethical considerations in AI and machine learning, especially in an educational context, and are familiar with strategies for mitigating bias
- Domain understanding: You have a solid understanding of education technology, curriculum development, and learning science
- Bachelor’s degree, with a concentration in Computer Science or a related field preferred; postgraduate degree preferred
- 5+ years of transferrable technical experience (e.g., software engineering, ML engineering, data science)
- 2+ years applying AI, machine learning, and natural language processing concepts to real world problems
- 1+ years experience related to education (ed tech, instructional design, learning science research, teaching, etc.), with a focus on literacy or writing preferred
- A high level familiarity with the architecture and operation of large language models, and a nuanced understanding of their capabilities and limitations
- A motivation for Khan Academy's mission “to provide a free world-class education for anyone, anywhere.”
What the job involves
- As a Senior AI Engineer, you’ll take responsibility for integrating AI into Khan Academy’s Literacy products, collaborating with our Product Management, Design, Engineering, and Content teams to develop tools and processes that ensure the consistency and quality of AI support for student reading and writing
- Collaborate with designers, product managers, and engineers to build AI-driven features that support literacy education use cases
- Develop test datasets and evaluation criteria for the evaluation of AI outputs
- Measure, maintain, and improve AI output quality over time via experimentation with prompting, scaffolding, and implementation architectures
Application process
- Our top candidate(s) will provide a resume and a cover letter which includes a detailed description of:
- Their experience in prompt engineering and its relevance to this role
- Their teaching experience and its relevance to this role
- How they ensure the high quality of the prompts you create (use specific strategies and examples)
Our take
Khan Academy is a non-profit that provides free online education materials, including teacher tools, instruction videos, and practice exercises to support users of all ages. It has over 10 million users a month and covers subjects all the way up to college level.
With nearly a quarter of American adults unable to use mathematics in daily life, Khan Academy’s interactive quizzes, instructional videos, and teacher tools are timely. Khan Academy started life as a series of educational YouTube videos, before building a full-scale platform after receiving an influx of donations from Silicon Valley philanthropists. This background has led it to embrace rather than reject the educational possibilities of new tech such as AI, with the founder regarding traditional institution's banning of tools like ChatGPT as a mistake.
The company offers its tools completely for free, instead relying on donations and volunteers. A key focus is tackling wealth inequality in education. A partnership with the College Board (who produce entrance examinations for higher education) has made access to SAT test prep materials free for millions. 2024 saw a partnership with Microsoft for Khan Academy's Khanmigo product, now free to use for Microsoft customers.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
23% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 5 rounds)
Jul 2020
$3m
GRANT
Oct 2017
$3m
GRANT
Total funding: $16.2m
Company benefits
- Flexible spending account (FSA)
- Dental insurance
- Optical insurance
- Life insurance
- Performance bonus
- 401K plan
- Family medical leave
- Diversity program
- Pet friendly workplace
- Work from home opportunities
- Health insurance
- Affinity groups where Parents, Black, Hispanic/Latino, Women and Gender Minorities, and LGBTQIA+ identified folks come together
Company HQ
Mountain View, CA
Leadership
Caroline Hu Flexer
(CEO)Holds a BA and MArch in Architecture from Stanford and Harvard University. They also have an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business, and formerly co-founded Duck Duck Moose, a mobile educational platform for children.
Salman Khan
(Executive Director)They graduated from Harvard Business School and have previously worked in Finance.
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