Senior Staff Software Engineer - Learning Content Experience

Coursera was launched in 2012 by Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller with a mission to provide universal access to world-class learning. It is now one of the largest online learning platforms in the world, with 183 million registered learners as of June 30, 2025. Coursera partners with over 350 leading university and industry partners to offer a broad catalog of content and credentials, including courses, Specializations, Professional Certificates, and degrees. Coursera’s platform innovations enable instructors to deliver scalable, personalized, and verified learning experiences to their learners. Institutions worldwide rely on Coursera to upskill and reskill their employees, citizens, and students in high-demand fields such as GenAI, data science, technology, and business. Coursera is a Delaware public benefit corporation and a B Corp.

Join us in our mission to create a world where anyone, anywhere can transform their life through access to education. We're seeking talented individuals who share our passion and drive to revolutionize the way the world learns.

Coursera has a commitment to enabling flexibility and workspace choices for employees. Our interviews and onboarding are entirely virtual, providing a smooth and efficient experience for our candidates. As an employee, we enable you to select your main way of working, whether it's from home, one of our offices or hubs, or a co-working space near you. We require candidates to possess eligible working rights and have a compatible timezone overlap with their team to facilitate seamless collaboration.

Job Overview: 

The Learning Content Experience (LCE) team delivers all aspects of our content experience, including how content is ingested, generated, or authored, and how learners engage with instruction, practice their skills, and undergo evaluation. This area also includes the supporting building blocks for this experience, such as how learners receive guidance throughout the process, how an engaging, hands-on experience can be delivered in a specialized domain, and even how we assess learners' skills and tie them to outcomes.

As a senior staff engineer, you will collaborate with both technical and cross-functional leaders to help set direction for an organization of 70+ engineers. Through this collaboration, you will build a deep understanding of Product and business needs and identify opportunities for technology to further our mission. In addition, you'll also work closely with individual teams to dive into particularly hairy explorations and deliverables across this broad roadmap; you will influence technical decisions and design trade-offs to ensure we can speedily deliver on ambitious, innovative goals while building the foundations for extension and scale in years to come. Last but not least, you'll partner with Tech Leads from each team to create a forum where there is open discussion of technical challenges and opportunities to learn and grow together.

Responsibilities:

• Work cross-functionally with engineering, product, design, and data teams to inform a roadmap that balances long-term and short-term priorities, based on both big-picture perspective as well as data-informed learnings
• Collaborate with tech leads to identify and understand key architectural problems in the Learning Content Experience (LCE) domain
• Develop an architecture that efficiently addresses business challenges such as emergent complexity, leveraging foundational knowledge of design patterns and practical experience
• Promote sustainable architectural solutions by establishing and advocating for core principles, documented through decision records on API design, data storage strategies, and other key choices
• Apply industry best practices and system design expertise to guide local design decisions through collaboration and reviews with engineers
• Mentor and guide fellow engineers to help them improve their technical ability and become more effective product software engineers
• Initiate and lead high-leverage projects to raise the quality bar for how we work and what we deliver (e.g. by improving developer productivity, and/or the quality, performance, availability, and resiliency of our systems and teams)

Basic Qualifications:

• 8+ years of experience working in a relevant product software engineering role
• 3+ years of experience iteratively driving architecture decisions in a single domain, evaluating success, and adapting these choices to changing product and business needs
• Expertise in designing highly-scalable and performant full-stack applications, microservices, and storage layers using common frameworks, languages, and infrastructure (e.g. Java, MySQL, NoSQL, Kafka or equivalent)
• Knowledge of professional software engineering and best practices for the full SDLC, including technical design, coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, documentation, and operations
• Able to communicate effectively at multiple levels of abstraction to both technical and non-technical stakeholders, both verbally and in writing
• A strong sense of ownership and conscientiousness, with a strong desire to learn about products, people, and technology; proactive and action-oriented
• Strong empathy for both engineers and cross-functional partners, to enable the right balance of inquisitive information-gathering and timely decision-making in order to identity problems, overcome ambiguity, and align others on a solution

Bonus qualifications:

• Experience in hybrid teams supporting both external user-facing web products and internal platforms to enable other teams
• Expertise in technologies like ReactJS, GraphQL/DGS, DynamoDB, and Redis for designing scalable and high-performance applications end-to-end
• Experience with generative AI tools and supporting processes and systems; proficient in identifying opportunities enabled by emerging technologies while managing production needs for quality and scalability
• Strong track record of leadership and mentorship, preferably in a remote environment
• Experience with teams with diverse identities and working styles, tailoring approaches to bring out the best contributions from each individual teammate

We recognize that qualified candidates may not meet 100% of the qualifications listed above. If you’re passionate about this role and believe your skills and experiences align with what we’re looking for, we encourage you to apply.

If this opportunity interests you, you might like this course on Coursera:

• Software Design and Architecture Specialization
• Generative AI for Software Development Skill Certificate
• Connected Leadership

Compensation

US Zone 1: From $209,600 to $277,720

US Zone 2: From $178,600 to $235,850

US Zone 3: From $167,600 to $222,000

The range(s) listed above is the expected annual base salary for this role, subject to change.

Salary is just one component of Coursera’s total rewards package. All regular employees are also eligible for a bonus program and equity in the form of RSU’s.

A number of factors are taken into account when determining pay, which includes: job level, location, training/education, business need, skill set and internal equity. 

Current Zone Locations:

• Zone 1- San Francisco Metro, New York City Metro or Seattle Metro
• Zone 2 - CA (outside of SF Bay Area), CO, CT, DC, GA, IL, MA, MD, NY/NJ (other than NYC), OR, RI, TX, VA, WA (other than Seattle)
• Zone 3 - all other US locations

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