Backend Engineer: Learning Technologies & Author Team Codecademy
New York, NY

Job Description

Hello, World! Codecademy has helped over 45 million people from around the world upgrade their careers with engaging, accessible, and flexible education on programming and data skills. We provide over 200 hands-on interactive lessons ranging from Python to R to Javascript and everything in between. Our learners have gone on to start companies, new jobs, and new lives thanks to what they've learned with Codecademy, and we're thrilled to be working to take that impact to the next level.

Codecademy was started in 2011 by two college students in a dorm room at Columbia that were frustrated by the huge gap between education and employment. A few years later, we are a rapidly growing, diverse team of 75+ in SoHo, NYC. We've raised over $40m in venture capital funding from top investors including Union Square Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Naspers, Y Combinator, and more.

If you want to help build a business that impacts tens of millions of people each year and helps them lead better lives, join us!

The Learning Technologies & Author Team owns three key initiatives at Codecademy:

1) supporting new technologies in the platform to enable the launch of new courses on the site

2) investing in our core learning environment to improve engagement metrics and support learning initiatives on other teams

3) iterating on our internal CMS to scale learning content creation

As an engineer on the Learning Technologies & Author team you develop a deep understanding of the various services that work together to make the interactive Learning Environment tick. You may be specialized in a particular technology or domain, but are comfortable working across the stack: LT&A engineers dive into terraform modules backing Docker swarm clusters and swim up to the front-end to implement novel learning interactions. You are an independent and self-motivated engineer and are eager to jump into codebases that are unfamiliar to you. You value quality code and testing, yet can quickly turn around on a prototype.

What You'll Do

* Extend the code evaluation engine that parses and evaluates code samples submitted by our learners, millions of times every single day (Go, Docker, AWS)
* Improve the interactive Learning Environment by creating new experiences, and increasing its reliability and performance (React, Ruby on Rails, Go)
* Design and improve systems for gaining insights about user learning (Ruby on Rails, Go, AWS Redshift/SQL)
* Design and improve APIs to enable other product teams to surface learning data to users in novel ways (Ruby, Go)
* Scale learning content production capacity by building new content production workflows in our internal CMS (React, Ruby, Go)

What You'll Need

* At least 4 years of professional experience developing web applications using Ruby on Rails, Go, and/or JavaScript
* Experience designing APIs from the ground up; comfortable with API design patterns (REST, RPC)
* Experience working with modern front-end frameworks. We use React, Redux, and Webpack
* A passion for testing best practices; can write unit tests in your favorite language with your eyes closed
* Experience working with both SQL and NoSQL databases. We currently use a combination of PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and Amazon Redshift
* Familiarity with containerization technologies. We use Docker extensively in development and production

What Will Make You Stand Out

* Experience with ops and/or containerization technologies: Kubernetes, Terraform, EC2, ECS, Puppet, Ansible, Chef, etc.
* Particularly strong front-end experience in the React ecosystem
* Expertise in HTML & CSS, with a knack for layout, specificity, cross browser compatibility, and accessibility
* Proven empathy for our users, such as a background in education or past experience using our site

At Codecademy, we are committed to teaching people the skills they need to upgrade their careers. Codecademy aims to educate a richly diverse demographic of users with our product and in order to accomplish this, we believe our team should reflect that rich diversity. Our company celebrates diversity in all of its forms-- race, gender, color, national origin, marital status, sexuality, religion, veteran status, age, ability, disability status-- and works to create an inclusive workplace where people of all backgrounds and beliefs are empowered to better their futures.