Senior Staff Software Engineer

About us

At Udemy, we’re on a mission to transform lives through learning. Through our intelligent skills platform and a global community of instructors, we’ve helped nearly 80 million learners and more than 17,000 organizations achieve their goals. Come join us in ensuring everyone, everywhere has access to the skills they need to unlock their potential and create possibilities for themselves and others. Learn more about us on our company page.

Where we work

Udemy is a global company headquartered in San Francisco, with additional U.S. offices in Denver and Austin, and international hubs in Australia, India, Ireland, Mexico, and Türkiye. This is an in-office position, requiring three days a week in the office (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday) and flexibility on Mondays and Fridays.

About your skills

• Strategic Thinking: You possess a strategic mindset, envisioning the long-term direction of projects and initiatives and making informed decisions that align with organizational goals and drive sustainable growth and innovation.

• Adaptability and Learning Agility: You thrive in dynamic environments, quickly adapting to new technologies, methodologies, and challenges. Your eagerness to learn and ability to pivot effectively contribute to the team's success in a rapidly evolving industry.

• Leadership and Mentorship Abilities: You have a track record of inspiring and empowering team members, providing guidance and mentorship to junior engineers, and fostering a culture of continuous learning and growth within the team.

• Cross-functional Partnership: You excel in managing stakeholder expectations, fostering positive relationships with internal teams, users, and other key stakeholders, and effectively communicating technical decisions, project progress, and milestones.

About this role

The Instructor Content Opportunities (ICO) team at Udemy is dedicated to building platforms and tools that help instructors succeed—whether they’re creating courses, assessing learners, or managing their content. We work on foundational systems and other instructor-facing experiences that directly impact how instructors teach and how learners learn. Our goal is to empower instructors to deliver high-quality learning experiences while continually improving engagement, satisfaction, and outcomes for learners around the world.

As a Senior Staff Backend Engineer (IC4), you will take a leadership role in shaping the architecture and development of backend systems that support instructor-facing products. This position involves working across the stack, from backend services to frontend interfaces, collaborating with cross-functional teams to deliver data-driven tools and insights. While your initial focus will be on projects within the instructor content opportunities space, you will also contribute to other instructor-related initiatives across the organization. Regardless of the project, your work will support Udemy’s instructor ecosystem, helping instructors around the world succeed.

What you’ll be doing

• Designing, developing, and maintaining applications that empower instructors to create high-quality content and learning products.

• Leading architecture and implementation efforts for backend platforms and APIs, enabling real-time content discovery and insights.

• Implementing scalable backend services and APIs, focusing on ensuring seamless front-end integration via GraphQL, supporting real-time content discovery tools, and instructor-facing interfaces.

• Replacing and modernizing legacy services, reducing tech debt, and improving system performance and maintainability.

• Collaborating closely with product, design, and data teams to ensure a smooth, integrated user experience for instructors, aligning content development with business objectives.

• Owning the technical vision for backend architecture, service boundaries, data flows, and system design.

• Enhancing and automating the gathering and analysis of organizational content needs, improving transparency, and aligning content development strategies with business goals.

• Leading complex technical projects from design through implementation, ensuring scalable, high-performance solutions.

• Growing a team of engineers focused on building intuitive, maintainable, and powerful experiences.

• Implementing best practices for observability, security, testing, and performance tuning.

• Driving technical direction for projects involving complex data workflows, content gap analysis, and instructor guidance tooling.

• Contributing to and championing engineering excellence through code reviews, mentorship, and cross-team collaboration.

• Incorporating experiment-driven development to improve the overall customer journey continuously.

• Participating in agile ceremonies (daily standups, sprint planning, sprint-end demos, and retrospectives) to drive product innovation and collaboration across teams.

What you’ll have

• B.S. degree or higher in Computer Science or a related technical field.

• 8+ years of full-time engineering experience

• Fluency in English

• Strong experience designing and building distributed systems, microservices, and service-oriented architectures.

• Solid understanding of object-oriented programming, system design, and scalable architecture patterns.

• Experience with modern backend technologies and frameworks (we use Kotlin and Python, but any comparable experience is welcome).

• Proficiency in designing secure, performant, and reliable APIs, including experience with REST and gRPC/Protobuf.

• Any experience with frontend development or understanding of modern web development frameworks (such as React, Vue, etc.) and hands-on experience with GraphQL, especially in designing and optimizing schema for frontend/backend collaboration, is a plus.

• Familiarity with event-driven architectures and tools like Kafka, Redis, or similar.

• A data-informed mindset, with experience using analytics and experimentation to guide decisions.

• Experience working with medium-sized agile development teams

• Lead large efforts involving multiple stakeholders

• Well organized, disciplined, and able to manage time and priorities effectively

• A track record of cross-functional collaboration, particularly with product, design, and data teams.

• Excellent communication skills and the ability to drive complex projects with multiple stakeholders.

• A passion for building solutions that empower instructors and enhance the learning experience on a global scale.

We understand that not everyone will match each of the above qualifications. However, we also realize that everyone has unique experiences that can add value to our company. Even if you think your background might not perfectly align, we'd love to hear from you!

Life at Udemy 

We aspire to be as vibrant and dynamic as the communities we serve, as inquisitive as those who use our platform, and as revolutionary as the future we strive to open for everyone. Here are some of the things we love about life at Udemy:

• We’re invested in creating an inclusive environment that welcomes a diverse range of backgrounds and experiences. From creating employee resource groups, ensuring we’re a Fair Pay Workplace, and building a flexible work culture, our belonging, equity, diversity, and inclusion (BEDI) initiatives always put our people first. We want you to be able to bring your authentic self to work because when we all do, we’re better for it.

• Learning is what we do – inside and out. Our Learning & Development team is second to none, helping ensure your journey is one of continuous progression. You’ll also have unlimited access to Udemy courses, monthly UDays (meeting-free professional development days), and a generous annual professional development stipend.

• Our reason to exist is to revolutionize learning – that calls for taking risks and learning from failures. Whether it’s our hackathons (a company-wide effort to envision new possibilities for our product) or sharing our prototypes, we see experimentation as a crucial step on the path to success.

• We’re committed to creating world-class employee experiences and are proud of the recognition of this by Great Place to Work. 

Of course, the best thing about being part of Udemy is knowing your work makes a difference for people and organizations around the world. You’ve got the skills; why not use them to help others develop theirs?

At Udemy, we value diversity and inclusion and consider qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, ancestry, age, genetic information, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital or family status, veteran status, medical condition, or disability. 

Our Benefits Start with U

Our benefits start with you and were built to provide you and your family with the protection and care you need, making it easy to access the right coverage when you need it most. Benefits vary by region, and we encourage applicants to review our US Benefits,  Ireland Benefits & Turkiye Benefits pages to get an understanding of some of the benefits we offer. For details on region-specific benefits, please refer to the information provided during the hiring process. 

Information regarding data privacy is available within the Udemy Careers Privacy Notice.