Product Engineer

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

Engineers at Brilliant work closely with members of our Product, Design, and Content teams in cross-disciplinary pods to solve important problems for our learners. We're opportunistically hiring exceptional product engineers who will elevate the effectiveness of our team along various dimensions.

We are currently hiring for multiple roles with distinct but overlapping skill sets:

• Product Engineer (Learning Experience): this frontend-leaning role on our Learning Experience team entails building Brilliant's interactive learning interface, the various types of interactivity that appear throughout the course of our courses and lessons, and the various authoring tools that our Content team use to build out those courses and lessons.

• Backend Engineer (Product / Platform): this specialist role involves leveling up our backend architecture while also contributing to product development. Your long term home would probably be on the Platform pod, but you'd do a tour of duty on one or more Product pods to build empathy for their pain points before helping to modernize the backend and make the whole team more productive.

Interactive education is in its infancy: we've only scratched the surface of what's possible with computer-based pedagogy. Our work helps people across Brilliant teach topics from vector calculus to neural networks in an interactive way. Come build the future of interactive learning with us!

Responsibilities

• Bring new features from conception to completion, helping people around the world to learn more effectively by contributing code across our entire stack.
• 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”.
• Exercise a high degree of autonomy and technical authority on a team that trusts you to do what's right for our users but is there to support you when you need it.
• Contribute to a culture of excellence within your pod, setting high standards for candor and mutual accountability, and striking a careful balance between velocity and quality.
• Advocate for initiatives that will improve developer experience for Brilliant's engineers and user experience for Brilliant's users.
• Frequently ask: How does this impact our learners?

Who are you?

• You have at least 4 years of professional experience in software engineering.
• You got into programming because you’re motivated by solving users’ problems.
• You're capable of working across the stack, and you're most energized when owning feature implementations end-to-end.
• 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're excited to collaborate closely with talented engineers, product managers, and designers. You enjoy solving problems as a team, pair-programming, and sharing knowledge. You want to be a mentor and to be mentored.
• You have deep experience with a few languages and frameworks, and you know what you do and do not like about them. 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 and patterns, recognizing the differences between a game-changer and a passing fad.
• Lack of prior experience with a specific technology is never disqualifying, but extensive experience with Elm, Django, or GraphQL would help you fill important skill gaps on our current team.
• You have a favorite product and can articulate your perspective on what makes using it delightful. You often think about how the products you use could be better.