Senior/Staff Software Engineer (Interactives)

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

Responsibilities

• 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?

Who are you?

• 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.