Backend/API Engineer

Quizlet’s mission is to help students (and their teachers) practice and master whatever they’re learning. We provide engaging and customizable activities with content contributions from people everywhere (over 150+ million study sets and counting). We have fanatical users, significant organic growth, and a strong business model that got us to profitability before we raised venture capital money.

The Role

• Design, build, and maintain APIs that power Quizlet's apps and third party users

• Design, build, and maintain backend services that power the API and other parts of our system

• Investigate and choose the right technologies and libraries for our stack

• Drive and set engineering standards, coding patterns, and best practices

• Work with all engineering platforms to build and ship transformational products for education

• Assist with production monitoring and debugging of the backend stack

Example Projects:

• Designing and building an ORM for a new Quizlet data model

• Abstracting, building, and deploying a cross-platform notifications service

• Migrating our API query language to GraphQL

• Implementing a performant and distributed media generation and caching service

• Identifying and implementing performance improvements for our machine learning pipeline

Qualifications and Experience

• 7+ years in the industry as a software engineer

• 3+ years experience working on high throughput APIs and/or services

• Experience architecting and deploying scaleable services from scratch— interfacing with external stakeholders to assemble requirements, drawing up architecture proposals, and engineering planning

• Experience working with the JVM (or strongly typed languages) and RDBMS in a production environment

• Experience dealing with DevOps concerns for a product of significant scale

• A passion for improving education

Bonus Points For...

• Experience with distributed systems and elegant, composable data pipelines

• Experience with large-scale user-generated content applications

• Experience with performance optimization and profiling

• Experience with Google Cloud Platform

• Knowledge of PHP or Python

Quizlet’s Team Culture

We’re extremely proud of the powerful impact our study tools are having on people’s lives across the U.S. and the world. Our focus on quality, usability, and performance across all platforms has helped Quizlet grow organically to a top U.S. web brand with top-ten education apps on iOS and Android. We regularly visit classrooms across the Bay Area to see Quizlet’s users in action. We believe in teamwork and communication, and we believe in each other — every member has the confidence and flexibility to take a stab at new problems across functions. We love technology and we love helping people. Come join us!