Staff Backend Engineer, Memrise
Language learning system
Be an early applicant
Language learning system
21-100 employees
Be an early applicant
21-100 employees
Company mission
Memrise's mission is to turn learning into a recreational activity.
Role
Who you are
- Deep experience with Kafka & event-driven systems in production
- Advanced backend engineering with Kotlin (or equivalent JVM stack)
- Strong knowledge of distributed systems and cloud-native architecture (preferably AWS)
- Proven ability to apply AI/ML tools in DevOps, testing, and observability contexts
- High ownership and product thinking; sees platforms as living systems to evolve
- Love solving technical puzzles with real-world impact
- Lead by example and elevate the people around you
- Are passionate about language, learning, and AI
- Believe platforms should be elegant, observable, and resilient
What the job involves
- We’re looking for a Staff Backend Engineer to lead the design, development, and ongoing evolution of a world-class language learning platform
- This is a foundational engineering role where your mission is to architect and build a highly robust, reliable, and scalable system using event-driven architecture as the backbone
- AI will be used to support development, monitoring, and testing—but what we truly need is a technical leader who owns the long-term stability and performance of the platform
- You’ll be tasked with shaping how millions of people around the globe experience language learning, with a mandate to deliver durable infrastructure and intelligent services that scale with our ambitions
- Architect and own the event-driven platform that powers our learning systems, with a focus on reliability, scalability, and future extensibility
- Leverage AI-driven tools to accelerate platform development, testing, monitoring, and continuous evolution
- Lead the modernisation of our monitoring and observability, ensuring end-to-end visibility across distributed services
- Optimise and scale our Kafka infrastructure as a foundational component of our event-driven system
- Deliver a resilient data platform that supports advanced analytics and AI-driven features across the product
- Redefine our QA automation strategy using AI to improve reliability and speed
- Act as a hands-on technical leader, mentoring engineers, guiding architecture decisions, and ensuring best practices in system design and reliability
- This is not a feature factory job
- This is platform ownership. You’ll architect and build the learning backbone of a product used globally—with AI accelerating delivery, but human leadership ensuring stability, reliability, and scale
- We're building something lasting, and we need someone who thrives in ambiguity, takes full ownership, and builds with long-term clarity
Application process
- 1. Screening call with the Hiring manager - (20-25 Min)
- 2. Coding interview ( 1.5 Hours)
- 3. System Design Interview ( 1 Hour)
- 4. Soft skills call ( 30 Minutes)
Salary benchmarks
Our take
Memrise's USP is that their content adapts to users’ needs as they progress through their lessons. They were originally a general learning platform but saw the importance of focus, so narrowed down to languages.
They have built the service to work well on desktop and mobile, which is another differentiator that has enabled them to build a loyal customer base. Apple showed off Memrise during a WWDC event, helping create publicity for the product.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Company
Funding (last 2 of 5 rounds)
Jun 2018
$15.5m
SERIES B
Dec 2012
$5.1m
SERIES A
Total funding: $21.8m
Company benefits
- Share options, so you can retire on an island
- Generous Learning and Development budget for training, conferences, books and L&D leave
- Enhanced Parental Leave
- Flexible working options (time-wise, plus we have standing desks)
- Private health insurance with Vitality, and related perks (50% off a Virgin and Nuffield Health Gym memberships)
- Dental Insurance with Unum
- Quarterly hackathons
- Language classes with in-office and virtual tutors
- Pet friendly office and pet-petting colleagues
- Cycle-to-work scheme
- 25 days holiday (excl. bank holidays)
- Health insurance
Company HQ
Spitalfields, London, UK
Leadership
Ed Cooke
(Executive Chairman)Studied Psychology at Oxford University. Became a "Grand Master of Memory" and spent 7 years researching and writing about memory techniques.
Ben Whately
(CPO)Graduated from Oxford University with a degree in Experimental Psychology and after starting their own company has been working on bringing language learning to millions with Memrise.
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