Senior/Staff Software Engineer (Interactives)

United States·New YorkRemoteFull-timesenior

Software EngineerSoftware Engineering

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Quick Summary

Overview

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,

Technical Tools

Software EngineerSoftware Engineering

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, and we make hires very selectively and intentionally. We serve hundreds of thousands of paid subscribers, and want you to help us serve millions.

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, high-trust team. We maintain core hours (9:30am - 2:30pm Pacific) when everyone is online, regardless of timezone. About 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 Content. As an interactives engineer, you’ll craft the building blocks that power Brilliant's interactive learning experiences.

Brilliant's learning experiences blend thoughtful mechanics, intuitive level design, and deep pedagogical insights. Each interactive is driven by APIs designed for learning designers, our LLM-powered content agent, and our AI tutor, with every possible configuration guaranteed to be a correct, solvable, and meaningful puzzle. It's a tricky technical problem with a big payoff for our learners.

Solving this technical challenge enables us to build effective and engaging learning experiences at scale, helping our learners get the reps they need to achieve mastery. With your help, we'll teach all of STEM.

Check out these posts to learn more:

- A world-class tutor in every home

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

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

Craft new interactive building blocks that captivate learners and make foundational concepts addictive to master.

Build clear and expressive APIs designed for experts and AIs.

Own the technical implementation of learning experiences from idea to launch on a cross-functional team that trusts you to do what's right for our users but is there to support you when you need it.

Write simple, robust, readable code that teammates and future engineers can easily maintain and extend.

Contribute to a culture of excellence within your pod, setting high standards for candor and mutual accountability, and striking a careful balance between velocity and quality.

Frequently ask: How does this impact our learners?

You have at least 7 years of professional experience in web-focused software engineering, ideally with meaningful experience in one or more of game development, animation, or interactive media.

You’re motivated by building robust, maintainable, AI-interoperable software systems that drive user and business outcomes.

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 and LLMs to comprehend.

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 levels of productivity. You have a strongly-held POV on what effective AI-enabled software engineering looks like.

Lack of experience in a specific technology is never disqualifying, but experience with Elm or other functional programming languages would allow you to hit the ground running. This role works with Elm, JavaScript, TypeScript, HTML, CSS, and even SVG.

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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