General Interest – Engineering

About Brilliant

Brilliant's mission is to create a world of better problem solvers. We make games for learning in math, science, computer science, and data analysis, for iOS, Android, and web. On Brilliant, you learn by doing – there are no videos, everything is interactive. We get you hands-on, figuring things out on your own. We help learners develop intuition through interaction, build understanding through experimentation, and have fun.

We serve hundreds of thousands of paid subscribers, and we’re hoping you might be the right person to contribute to accelerating our footprint to millions of customers (and changed lives). In addition to what’s below, you can see all open roles and learn more about our team culture on our careers page.

We have always prioritized building a healthy business as the backbone of achieving our mission. We are default alive (will be profitable before needing to raise), don't over-hire, are growing new customers at an exciting pace (high double-digits year-over-year). Our investors are top-tier + mission aligned, and we’ve kept our valuations tethered to reality – we aren’t playing “catch up” like many others.

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 all here to do the best work of our lives together, and have a lot of fun along the way. 

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 (10am - 3pm Pacific) where everyone is online, regardless of timezone. Over half of us are located near our hubs in SF and NYC, and folks outside of those cities travel to attend team offsites once-per-quarter.

The Role

Note: This particular posting serves as a "general interest form" as opposed to a formal application for a specific role. Unfortunately, we are not hiring early/mid-career software generalists at this time.

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. While we’re already happy with our current team size and velocity, we occasionally hire exceptional software engineers with demonstrated histories of transformative impact to further elevate the team. You can apply to this role to be considered for such opportunities in the future.

Engineers we’ve hired through this general interest form in the past include former founders, early employees who grew into staff engineers at companies that achieved massive growth, and experienced engineering leaders who returned to the individual contributor path. These sorts of folks make up a significant percentage of our current team, and we’re interested in talking with more of them to explore what sort of transformative impact they might be able to achieve here.

• Bring new features from conception to completion, helping people around the world to learn more effectively by contributing code across our entire stack.
• Be mindful of the “big picture” from both a technical perspective and a business one, keeping your pod 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 your pod, 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 5 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.

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. About 1/3 of our team are parents, and we provide generous parental leave + up to $1900/mo in dependent healthcare coverage.

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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