Senior Staff Software Engineer

About Us

At Udemy, we’re on a mission to improve lives through the power of learning. We’re a leading global learning company and one of the world’s largest education platforms, with more than 67 million learners. Our goal is to provide flexible, effective skill development to empower organizations and individuals. 

Talented people are everywhere, and the right opportunity can be hard to come by. That’s why we’re focused on revolutionizing learning, using our skills and expertise to help others develop theirs and reach their full potential. Individually, we bring our unique perspective to reimagine the way we share knowledge. Together, we can improve lives by making learning more accessible for our learners, our instructors, and businesses around the world.

Hybrid work

Udemy is headquartered in San Francisco with global offices in Australia, India, Ireland, Türkiye, and other US locations. Our robust hybrid work model spans San Francisco, Denver, Ankara, Dublin, and Melbourne. This hybrid position requires two days per week in the office at the nearest hub. Learn more about us on our company page.

 

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.