Coursera

As a software engineer with Coursera, you will be building the core system that powers our platform. We have a host of tough problems waiting for the brightest minds to crack open, many of which are new and unique to our efforts to bring affordable education to everyone.

Depending on your skills, experience, and interest, you could be working on one or more of the following:

• Analytics. The datasets that we are building up are several orders of magnitude larger than any other higher-education datasets around. You will build up our analytics platform, diving deep into the data we collect to create interactive and engaging visualizations, and devise ways to use this data to improve the learning experience of the students on our platform.
• Systems and Operations. You will design our back-end systems to be scalable to millions of students, while making sure that they are robust and reliable. We have many unique problems to solve: for example, to support a single homework assignment in our databases class, our servers have to smoothly execute hundreds of thousands of arbitrary SQL queries, while protecting against malicious and potentially destructive code.
• Experimental Technology. Some of the challenges we face are so new that a standard term for them has yet to be invented. Here's a sampling: how can we design scalable systems that will allow us to automatically grade and assess millions of students taking classes in math, history, or literature? And how can we prevent cheating and verify the identity of our students without being overly intrusive?

We use a variety of technologies in our work, such as PHP, Amazon EC2, Amazon SQS, MySQL, memcached, and MongoDB. You don't need to come in knowing all of these; we are looking for talented engineers who can pick up the tools they need on the fly. What you should have is a demonstrated mastery of your craft, an impressive list of successful projects that you've engineered, and a passion for writing code that will help millions of students world-wide. If you have all of this and more, apply here.

As our software quality assurance engineer, you will be responsible for ensuring the quality and reliability of our software. This includes building the infrastructure required to automatically test all aspects of our website, and developing the necessary tools for monitoring our sites and tracking/prioritizing our bug reports.

You will be managing quality assurance at all levels of our system, from building test harnesses and managing software releases, to performing automated UI testing. As part of this role, you will also work closely with the engineering team to design future systems that are robust and reliable.

We are looking for a QA engineer who can handle the large amount of responsibility that this role entails, and excel in it. We use a variety of technologies in our work, such as PHP, Amazon EC2, Amazon SQS, MySQL, memcache, and MongoDB. You don't need to come in knowing all of these; we are looking for talented engineers who can pick up the tools they need on the fly. You should have demonstrated technical mastery, an impressive list of successful projects for which you've handled QA/reliability, and a passion for writing code that will help millions of students world-wide. Extensive experience with automated testing frameworks is a big plus. If you're up to the challenge, apply here.

Our web developers build all the features directly used by the students and instructors on our platform. As part of our small and agile team of web developers, you will be responsible for conceptualizing and implementing entire features from end-to-end, diving deep into our back-end infrastructure if need be.

In any given week, you could be working on building up a tight-knit community of students through social media integration; the next week, you could be designing an assessment infrastructure that will allow instructors to set new and exciting types of quizzes for students, helping them to learn better. Our web developers are all-rounders as comfortable with creating interactive visualizations for the vast amounts of educational data we've collected as they are with making our HTML5-heavy site interoperable across various browsers and mobile platforms.

We are looking for developers with demonstrated technical mastery and a long list of successful projects, particularly in HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. On our back-end, we use a variety of technologies, such as PHP, Amazon EC2, Amazon SQS, MySQL, memcache, and MongoDB. You don't need to come in knowing all of these; we want talented engineers who can pick up the tools they need on the fly, and who share our passion for writing code that will help millions of students across the world. If you fit this bill, apply here.

We are looking to hire a designer who can dream up elegant user interfaces and rapidly translate them into detailed mockups and working prototypes. As our first designer, you will conceptualize intuitive user interfaces and workflows in our entire platform, and you will take the lead in working with our engineers to integrate these designs into our system.

You will be responsible for much more than just the CSS on our website. For example, one of your roles could be designing a user experience that keeps our students engaged with the material and completing their courses, while at the same time allowing them to build a social network around the course material, connecting with old friends and making new ones.

Our ideal candidate will have a keen eye for design and a solid understanding of what it takes to make our user experiences as smooth and enjoyable as possible. Conducting usability studies and A/B tests should be second nature to you, and you should be as comfortable with a pencil and paper as you are with diving into HTML, CSS, and ideally JavaScript as well.

If this description is an understatement of your abilities, and if the thought of crafting pixel-perfect designs for millions of students around the world excites you, apply here.

As a Course Operations Specialist, you will be the bedrock of support to our teaching staff (instructors and teaching assistants for all of our courses), interacting directly with instructors across different disciplines to understand their needs and how their material and assessments can be best presented in our online system. You will need to understand the ins and outs of our web platform and effectively communicate this knowledge, both in a one-on-one setting and by creating documentation. This will be an opportunity to interact with world-class instructors, and work with them on implementing best practices for online teaching in their courses.

As part of this multi-faceted role, you will train our teaching staff to produce video lectures and other course content effectively, coaching the instructors through glitches and helping their teaching assistants learn to edit their videos and create textual and other content. You will help install the appropriate computer hardware and software to set up a recording station for a course's teaching staff. You will work with the course staff in helping to convert standard assessments into a computer-readable form, and possibly even come up with new forms of auto-graded assessments, to be implemented and incorporated into our platform by our engineering team. In addition, you may also be directly responsible for a small amount of videotaping and/or, video editing for for each course. As the teaching staff work on developing the course, you will also provide a significant amount of support to the teaching staff via email and/or phone.

If your patient temperament and strong interpersonal skills, coupled with your technical facility and ability to pick things up on the fly, means that you're the go-to person for all sorts of questions that people around you face, then you could be the right one to fill this job. To use your talent to improve the quality of education that millions of students world-wide will receive, apply here.

Passionate about making education affordable to the world, but still in school? Don't worry - we are hiring interns for all four of the positions listed above. We value and trust all of our interns; with us, you will have the freedom and mentorship you need to make a real contribution to our platform. If you have a past history of excellence and a demonstrated ability to learn rapidly on the job, we want to talk to you. And if you can't think of a better use of your summer vacation to help millions of students around the world, you'd want to talk to us here.