Software Engineer (Special Projects)

About Brilliant

Brilliant is creating a world of better problem solvers. We deliver learning that's interactive, adaptive, and fun – at scale. You can learn more about our approach, learners, and method on our about page.

We have always prioritized building a real, healthy business. We serve hundreds of thousands of paid subscribers, and want you to help us serve millions. We are default alive (will be profitable before needing to raise), and make hires very selectively and intentionally.

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 here to do the best work of our lives together.

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 (9:30am - 2:30pm Pacific) when everyone is online, regardless of timezone. Over half of us are located near our hubs in SF and NYC.

In addition to what’s below, you can see all open roles and learn more about our culture on our careers page.

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 business. Around 40% of the engineers at Brilliant are former founders and/or engineering leaders.

We're hiring a full-stack engineer to own a set of special projects that will help Brilliant reach millions more learners in the coming years. You'll be building a 0->1 experience that leverages various aspects of Brilliant's existing interactive learning ecosystem in new and novel ways. This work is on the cutting edge, and we're looking for someone with exceptional experience, expertise, and taste to own it.

Check out these blog posts to learn more about some related challenges:

- Hand-crafted, machine-made: How we make learning games with AI

- When “almost right” is catastrophically wrong: Evals for AI learning games

• Craft and iterate on a new product offering, contributing code in various backend and frontend systems across our entire stack.
• Be mindful of the “big picture” from both a technical perspective and a business one, keeping the project 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 the team, 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?

• You have at least 6 years of professional experience in web-focused software engineering, with meaningful experience going both deep and wide across the domain.
• You’re motivated by building robust, maintainable, AI-interoperable software systems that drive user and business outcomes.
• You’re capable of working across the stack, and you’re most energized when owning feature implementations end-to-end, including in third-party tools and data systems.
• 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 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 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.
• You’re constantly tinkering with AI tools and workflows and have used them to achieve surprising new levels of productivity.

Our Engineering Team

Brilliant's engineering team is small, elite, and AI-enabled. 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.

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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