Senior Backend Engineer: Content Platform

Job Description

We are NYC based but remote friendly!

Hello, World! Codecademy has helped tens of millions of learners upgrade their careers, build meaningful projects, and gain confidence in their skills with engaging, accessible, and flexible education on programming and data skills. We provide 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. Almost a decade later, we are a rapidly growing, diverse team of about 200 distributed through North America and headquartered in SoHo, NYC. We’ve raised over $87.5m in venture capital funding from top investors including Kleiner Perkins, Naspers, Owl Ventures, Union Square Ventures, 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 Content Platform team’s mission is to build technology that enables Codecademy curriculum authors to efficiently create, launch, and maintain a rapidly expanding library of content that powers Codecademy’s interactive learning experiences. Content Platform develops and maintains Codecademy’s CMS and the API that serves learning content data—such as lessons, quizzes, and projects—to user-facing clients. The team is part of the larger platform organization which is responsible for developing the foundational services, applications, and components that cut across all of Codecademy’s business units.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Design and architect solutions to complex and ambiguous problems
• Enable new curriculum to be taught interactively
• Improve our search service
• Build features that make authoring content more seamless
• Lead development of services across our platform that enable our users to achieve their learning goals
• Collaborate with other teams to get ahead of cross-team dependencies
• Contribute to engineering team-wide process improvements and automation
• Help enhance the scalability and efficiency of our infrastructure
• Design and improve systems for gaining insights about user learning
• Design and improve APIs to enable other product teams to surface learning data to users in novel ways (Ruby on Rails, Postgres, GraphQL)

WHAT YOU'LL NEED

• Proficiency with Ruby on Rails
• A minimum of 5 years of experience developing web applications (Ruby on Rails, Python, Java, Go)
• Experience designing APIs from the ground up; comfortable with API design patterns (REST, RPC, GraphQL)
• 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 primarily PostgreSQL and MongoDB

WHAT WILL MAKE YOU STAND OUT

• Particularly strong back-end experience in the Rails ecosystem
• Expertise in GraphQL and Apollo Federation
• Experience with ops and/or containerization technologies: Kubernetes, Terraform, EC2
• 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.