Staff Software Developer, Coursera
Search
Online learning platform
Open for applications
Online learning platform
1001+ employees
Open for applications
1001+ employees
Company mission
To provide life-transforming learning experiences to learners around the world.
Role
Who you are
- 5+ years of experience as a software engineer, preferably on a product-focused team
- Expertise in designing performant microservices and storage layers using common frameworks, languages, and infrastructure (e.g., Java, MySQL,, Kafka)
- Data-driven and strongly motivated by success and learnings through experiments and metrics analysis
- Proven ability to deliver features iteratively and adapt to changing product priorities
- Strong commitment to Coursera's mission of transforming lives through learning
Desirable
- Demonstrated expertise in Information Retrieval-related products, including areas like query serving, indexing, and ranking
- Experience with modern search technologies (e.g., Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Vespa, vector search, semantic search)
- Familiarity with AI/ML applications in product features (e.g., LLMs, ranking models)
- Strong track record of leadership and mentorship, preferably in a remote environment
What the job involves
- We are on a mission to help millions of learners discover the right learning content through an exceptional search experience. The Search team is responsible for building user-facing search features that help learners find the most relevant courses, videos, and learning paths on Coursera. Here are the team's goals:
- Enhanced Discovery: Build intuitive search experiences that understand learner intent and surface the most relevant content. This includes AI-powered features like natural language search, intelligent suggestions, and personalized summaries
- Conversion & Engagement: Drive key product metrics like Click through rate and enrollment rates by making search more helpful and actionable
- Innovation: Experiment with AI/ML capabilities to continuously improve the search experience, from query understanding to result organizations
- Lead the design and development of user-facing search features, including AI summaries, intelligent suggestions, and natural language search
- Measure your work thoroughly, analyze results, and generate hypotheses to drive product changes through A/B testing and experimentation
- Collaborate with ML and Data Science teams to integrate AI/ML capabilities into the search experience
- Make pragmatic technical decisions that balance speed of iteration with long-term maintainability
- Build scalable, performant search features that serve millions of learners worldwide
Application process
- Our interviews and onboarding are entirely virtual, providing a smooth and efficient experience for our candidates
Our take
Coursera was founded by Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng in 2012 with a vision of providing life-transforming learning experiences to learners around the world. It partners with universities and other educational institutions to deliver online courses to 40 million students, covering subjects like technology, business, science, and even autonomous cars.
Coursera sees itself as helping people get ready for the next wave of technological advancement. It is preparing individuals, companies, and governments to meet that challenge head-on and turn this disruption into opportunity. To help achieve this, it also has specific product offerings for the corporate market, as well as for governments and nonprofits.
The model of online courses that anyone can attend is very scalable, making Coursera appealing to investors, especially when the online education market is expected to be worth $20bn+ by 2023. Further, it received B Corp certification in February 2021, propelling its efforts to reduce barriers to high quality education.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
30% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 9 rounds)
Jul 2020
$130m
SERIES F
Apr 2019
$103m
SERIES E
Total funding: $443.1m
Company benefits
- Coursera covers the cost of tuition so you can earn a free master’s degree and develop new skills. That’s on top of free, lifelong access to courses and certificates on the platform
- We offer medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your dependents. Plus, free access to counseling and mental health services
- Get up to 16 weeks of fully-paid parental leave when you grow your family and bring a new child into your life
- We host Make-a-thon events twice a year to promote community and innovation. During Make-a-thon, you’ll dedicate time to attend workshops, work on passion projects, and pursue ideas outside of your day-to-day work
- Take paid time off when you need it. We have time off policies that promote flexibility so you can tailor your work schedule when life calls
- Our flexibility extends to where you work. You can choose to work from home, work from one of our offices, or try a combination of the two
- Employees earn company stock, so you can own what we build together and share in our success
Company HQ
Mountain View, CA
Leadership
Andrew Ng
(Chairman)CEO of Landing AI (helping companies adopt AI). Also a Professor of Computer Science at Stanford.
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