Engineering Manager

About Brilliant

Brilliant is making a world of great problem solvers. We focus on adults learning quantitative skills – especially in math, data, and CS/AI – and deliver a best-in-class interactive learning experience across web and apps. Our courses teach you what you need to know, while skipping the stuff you don’t – so expect more about solving equations, statistical analysis, logical deduction, neural networks, and generative AI, and less about abstract theorems and integrating complicated trig functions. 

We serve hundreds of thousands of paid subscribers, and we’re hoping you might be the right person to contribute to accelerating our footprint to millions of customers (and changed lives). In addition to what’s below, you can see all open roles and learn more about our team culture on our careers page.

We have always prioritized building a healthy business as the backbone of achieving our mission. We are default alive (will be profitable before needing to raise), have never had layoffs, are growing new customers at an exciting pace (high double-digits year-over-year). Our investors are top-tier + mission aligned, and we’ve kept our valuations tethered to reality – we aren’t playing “catch up” like many others.

In our day-to-day, we value adventure, excellence, generosity, and candor. We are optimists in the face of uncertainty, we take pride in our work, we go the extra mile for each other, and we tell it like it is (the good and the bad). We’re all here to do the best work of our lives together, and have a lot of fun along the way. 

We believe that real-time collaboration and human connection are necessary ingredients in building a high-velocity, creatively-oriented consumer product. We maintain core hours (10am - 3pm Pacific) where everyone is online, regardless of timezone. Over half of us are located near our hubs in SF and NYC, and folks outside of those cities travel to attend team offsites once-per-quarter.

The Role

Brilliant’s engineers are extraordinary programmers without big egos. We maintain high personal standards, continually pursue excellence, and support one another in doing the very best work of our careers. Our care for craft is eclipsed only by our care for our learners, and we believe that each of us deserves to work with folks who care as deeply as we do.

As an Engineering Manager focused on interactive learning experiences, you’ll be a hands-on technical leader and people manager focused on cultivating an ecosystem of technical building blocks that power Brilliant’s interactive learning experience. You’ll collaborate with a talented team of engineers, creative technologists, product managers, designers, and pedagogy experts to help craft the future of interactive learning.

Your Responsibilities

• Serve as a hands-on technical leader and people manager for a pod of 6-8 engineers, contributing to a culture of excellence and setting high standards for craft, candor, accountability, and ownership.
• Be mindful of the big picture from both a technical perspective and a business one, keeping your pod on track in terms of “building the right thing” and “building the thing right”.
• Serve as a paragon of collaboration, working hand-in-hand with stakeholders across domains like Product, Design, and Content to ensure we’re building the best possible experiences for our learners.
• Collaborate with engineering leaders like Sean Dennison, Jared Silver, and Kevin Smith to cultivate an environment where engineers are able to do the very best work of their careers.

Who are you?

• You have substantial experience at the intersection of technical leadership and people management. You know what excellence looks like and want to cultivate a team that achieves it through supportive coaching and clear/kind feedback.
• You have experience crafting libraries, SDKs, or frameworks used at scale by other engineers. Your thoughtful API design has created outsized technical leverage for folks consuming your work in the past. Bonus points for supporting an audience of non-engineers!
• You've worked on products with rich user interactivity and have significant experience crafting dynamic, performant web experiences.
• You engender a strong feedback culture by frequently and visibly pulling for feedback from your team. You celebrate and create an expectation of teammates holding one another to high standards. You’re excited to both lead and learn from your reports.
• You generate sustainable urgency for your team, helping them to achieve more together than they would alone and contextualizing the impact their efforts are having on the business.
• You cultivate a high-agency & solutions-oriented culture, matching people to problems, and solving them with clear standards and ownership rather than process.
• You look forward to being in the weeds with your team, doing the work hand-in-hand, because this is the most effective way to demonstrate what excellence looks like.
• You enjoy solving technical challenges in a way simple enough for an intern to understand and build upon. You avoid introducing complex, novel, or "clever" solutions. You write code for humans, not for computers.
• You believe in using the right tool for the job — even when it’s an unfamiliar one and especially when it's a boring one. You stay up to date with the latest technologies, recognizing the differences between a game-changer and a passing fad.
• You believe that the best and most impactful work of your career is still ahead of you, and you’re looking for a team and environment whose ambitions match your own. You’re excited to have an outsized impact and help build the future of interactive learning together.