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 in small, elite teams alongside colleagues from Product, Design, and Data to achieve the best possible outcomes for our learners and our business. We’re opportunistically hiring exceptional product engineers with a demonstrated history of transformative impact to further elevate the team.

Our primary focus is finding a backend-leaning engineer to join our User Motivation pod, the team responsible for making learning on Brilliant more motivating, engaging, and rewarding through various different game mechanics like league leaderboards, streaks, and experience points.

We're also hiring for our Growth pod, which helps more people commit to learning something new via Brilliant's logged out experience, new user experience, and payments infrastructure.

Finally, we're always hiring frontend specialists for our Learning pod, the team responsible for crafting Brilliant's learning experience, interactive frameworks, and authoring tools.

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 5 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 Python, 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.

Our Engineering Team

Brilliant's engineering team is small and elite. We believe in moving fast, fixing faster, and optimizing for outcomes over outputs. Our team is full of former founders, early employees, and engineering leaders turned ICs whose collective drive, judgement, and standards generate a palpable sense of momentum every day. The norm on this team is doing the very best work of our careers, and we both support and challenge each other every day to do exactly that.

Compensation and Benefits

We use a systematic compensation framework: salary scales are set each year for each job vertical, managers level folks on their team, and those levels are mapped directly to our compensation scales. A location-based adjustment is applied outside of SF and NYC (typically 5-10%) - feel free to ask us about your location!

Given the systematic approach, we always make First and Best offers - there is no negotiation (for new hires nor our existing teammates). This ensures people are paid based on their expected contribution, not their negotiation skills.

We offer top-notch health care plans, with 100% of the premiums covered for medical, dental, and vision for employees. About 1/3 of our team are parents, and we provide generous parental leave + up to $1900/mo in dependent healthcare coverage.

We offer flexible PTO, with a norm of taking off about 6 weeks per year (including federal holidays). We also provide home office equipment, a professional development stipend, and free food at our offices.

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