Fast Facts

Khan Academy is seeking a Senior Fullstack Engineer to join their Content Platform team, focusing on building and maintaining core systems that enhance educational content creation and distribution globally.

Responsibilities: Design and build complex frontend applications, maintain backend services, and improve performance and reliability of the content delivery systems.

Skills: Experience in building interactive web applications using React, backend services, strong project management skills, and empathy for learners.

Qualifications: 5+ years of experience in software engineering, with a focus on frontend and backend development, and familiarity with technical project leadership.

Location: Remote-friendly position available for candidates in the Continental US, Hawaii, and Canada.

Compensation: $137871 - $172339 / Annually

ABOUT KHAN ACADEMY

Khan Academy is a nonprofit with the mission to deliver a free, world-class education to anyone, anywhere. Our proven learning platform offers free, high-quality supplemental learning content and practice that cover Pre-K - 12th grade and early college core academic subjects, focusing on math and science. We have over 181 million registered learners globally and are committed to improving learning outcomes for students worldwide, focusing on learners in historically under-resourced communities.

OUR COMMUNITY 

Our students, teachers, and parents come from all walks of life, and so do we. Our team includes people from academia, traditional/non-traditional education, big tech companies, and tiny startups. We hire great people from diverse backgrounds and experiences because it makes our company stronger. We value diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging as necessary to achieve our mission and impact the communities we serve. We know that transforming education starts in-house with learning about ourselves and our colleagues. We strive to be world-class in investing in our people and commit to developing you as a professional.

THE ROLE

Khan Academy’s Content Platform team builds and maintains the core systems that power how our content is created, translated, published, and served at global scale. Our work directly supports equitable access to high-quality learning by enabling creators, translators, and downstream product teams to operate efficiently, reliably, and safely.

The Content Platform team owns not only backend services and pipelines, but also large, complex frontend surfaces used daily by content creators, translators, and internal product teams around the world.

As a Platform Engineer, you’ll focus on the foundational infrastructure, tooling, pipelines, and frontend and backend systems that other teams depend on, guided by our Engineering Principles. You might work on projects such as:

• Designing and building complex, stateful frontend applications that power critical authoring, translation, and review workflows at global scale.
• Designing and evolving content pipelines that support authoring, localization, validation, and publishing for millions of learners worldwide.
• Building and maintaining internal platforms, APIs, and services that enable product teams and content creators to move faster with confidence.
• Improving the performance, reliability, and observability of systems that serve content.
• Establishing strong engineering standards around testing, monitoring, migrations, and system ownership to support long-term sustainability.

With the recent launch of Khanmigo and AI-powered capabilities, this role will also help ensure that our platform can safely and reliably support AI-enabled workflows, whether that’s content generation, review, translation, or delivery, while maintaining high quality, trust, and scale. This is a role for engineers who enjoy working close to the core of the system, enabling others, and solving complex platform problems that have outsized impact across the organization, including owning and evolving long-lived frontend architectures that many teams rely on.

We are a remote-first organization and we strive to build using technology that is best suited to solving problems for our learners. Currently, we build with Go, GraphQL, JavaScript, React & React Native, Redux and we adopt new technologies like LLMs when they’ll help us better achieve our goals. At Khan, one of our values is “Cultivate Learning Mindsets”, so for us, it’s important that we’re working with all of our engineers to help match the right opportunity to the right individual, in order to ensure every engineer is operating at their “learning edge”.

You can read about our latest work on our Engineering Blog. A few highlights:

• Incremental Rewrites with GraphQL
• Our Transition to React Native
• Go + Services = One Goliath Project
• How Engineering Principles Can Help You Scale
• How to upgrade hundreds of React components without breaking production

WHAT YOU BRING

• 5+ years of experience building world-class product experiences for interactive web applications.
• Deep experience building and maintaining large, complex frontend applications (React or similar), including state management, data modeling, performance optimization, and long-term maintainability.
• Experience building and maintaining scalable backend services, and working effectively across frontend and backend boundaries.
• Experience leading or making significant contributions to frontend refactors, migrations, or architectural improvements in production systems.
• Strong technical project management skills, as our Senior Software Engineers often lead projects.
• Experience building and maintaining complex software. You’ll join us in writing clean, maintainable software that solves hard problems. You’ll write testable, quality code. You’ll push the team and the mission forward with your contributions.
• Strong communication, thoughtfulness, and desire to give and receive regular feedback
• Empathy for learners around the world. You love learning and are excited about helping others learn to love learning. You’re motivated to learn new things and share what you learn with the world.
• Proven cross-cultural competency skills demonstrating self-awareness, awareness of other, and the ability to adopt inclusive perspectives, attitudes, and behaviors to drive inclusion and belonging throughout the organization.
• Experience using Generative AI / LLMs to build products a plus (but not required).

Please note: We welcome candidates with experience in any and all technologies. We don’t require experience in any particular language or tool. Our commitment to on-boarding and mentorship means you won’t be left in the dark as you learn new technologies.

PERKS AND BENEFITS

We may be a non-profit, but we reward our talented team extremely well! We offer:

• Competitive salaries
• Ample paid time off as needed – Your well-being is a priority.
• Remote-first culture - that caters to your time zone, with open flexibility as needed, at times
• Generous parental leave
• An exceptional team that trusts you and gives you the freedom to do your best
• The chance to put your talents towards a deeply meaningful mission and the opportunity to work on high-impact products that are already defining the future of education
• Opportunities to connect through affinity, ally, and social groups
• And we offer all those other typical benefits as well: 401(k) + 4% matching & comprehensive insurance, including medical, dental, vision, and life

At Khan Academy we are committed to fair and equitable compensation practices, the well-being of our employees, and our Khan community. This belief is why we have built out a robust Total Rewards package that includes competitive base salaries, and extensive benefits and perks to support physical, mental, and financial well-being.

The target salary range for this position is $137,871 - $172,339 USD / $186,306 - $232,883 CAD. The pay range for this position is a general guideline only. The salary offered will depend on internal pay equity and the candidate’s relevant skills, experience, qualifications, and job market data. Additional incentives are provided as part of the complete total rewards package, in addition to comprehensive medical and other benefits.

MORE ABOUT US

• Sal’s TED talk from 2011
• Sal’s TED talk from 2015
• Sal's TED talk from 2023
• Our team: http://www.khanacademy.org/about/the-team

OUR COMPANY VALUES

Live & breathe learners

We deeply understand and empathize with our users. We leverage user insights, research, and experience to build content, products, services, and experiences that our users trust and love. Our success is defined by the success of our learners and educators.

Take a stand

As a company, we have conviction in our aspirational point of view of how education will evolve. The work we do is in service to moving towards that point of view. However, we also listen, learn and flex in the face of new data, and commit to evolving this point of view as the industry and our users evolve.

Embrace diverse perspectives

We are a diverse community. We seek out and embrace a diversity of voices, perspectives and life experiences leading to stronger, more inclusive teams and better outcomes. As individuals, we are committed to bringing up tough topics and leaning into different points of view with curiosity. We actively listen, learn and collaborate to gain a shared understanding. When a decision is made, we commit to moving forward as a united team.

Work responsibly and sustainably

We understand that achieving our audacious mission is a marathon, so we set realistic timelines and we focus on delivery that also links to the bigger picture. As a non-profit, we are supported by the generosity of donors as well as strategic partners, and understand our responsibility to our finite resources. We spend every dollar as though it were our own. We are responsible for the impact we have on the world and to each other. We ensure our team and company stay healthy and financially sustainable.

Bring out the joy

We are committed to making learning a joyful process. This informs what we build for our users and the culture we co-create with our teammates, partners and donors.

Cultivate learning mindset

We believe in the power of growth for learners and for ourselves. We constantly learn and teach to improve our offerings, ourselves, and our organization. We learn from our mistakes and aren’t afraid to fail. We don't let past failures or successes stop us from taking future bold action and achieving our goals.

Deliver wow

We insist on high standards and deliver delightful, effective end-to-end experiences that our users can rely on. We choose to focus on fewer things — each of which aligns to our ambitious vision — so we can deliver high-quality experiences that accelerate positive measurable learning with our strategic partners.

We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, or Veteran status. We value diversity, equity, and inclusion, and we encourage candidates from historically underrepresented groups to apply.

As part of this commitment, Khan Academy will ensure that persons with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodations for the hiring process. If reasonable accommodation is needed, please contact careers@khanacademy.org