Senior Software Engineer, Backend

Coursera was launched in 2012 by Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller with a mission to provide universal access to world-class learning. Today, it is one of the largest online learning platforms in the world, with
191 million registered learners as of September 30, 2025
. Coursera partners
with over 375 leading universities and industry partners
to offer a broad catalogue of content and credentials, including courses, Specializations, Professional Certificates, and degrees. Coursera's platform innovations — including generative AI-powered features like Coach, Role Play, and Course Builder, and role-based solutions like Skills Tracks — enable instructors, partners, and companies to deliver scalable, personalized, and verified learning. Institutions worldwide rely on Coursera to upskill and reskill their employees, students, and citizens in high-demand fields such as GenAI, data science, technology, and business, while learners globally turn to Coursera to master the skills they need to advance their careers. Coursera is a Delaware public benefit corporation and a B Corp.

We're a global platform aiming to transform lives through learning by offering transformative courses, certificates, and degrees that empower learners worldwide to advance their careers through skill mastery. We're looking for inventors, innovators, and lifelong learners eager to shape the future of education. If you're ready to build the global programs and tools that fuel the power of online learning, join Team Coursera.

At Coursera, we are committed to building a globally diverse team and are thrilled to extend employment opportunities to individuals in any country where we have a legal entity. We require candidates to possess eligible working rights and have a compatible timezone overlap with their team to facilitate seamless collaboration.
Coursera has a commitment to enabling flexibility and workspace choices for employees. Our interviews and onboarding are entirely virtual, providing a smooth and efficient experience for our candidates. As an employee, we enable you to select your main way of working, whether it's from home, one of our offices or hubs, or a co-working space near you.
Job Overview:
As a Backend Developer, you'll have a real opportunity to innovate, productize, and iterate at start-up speed. In this role, you'll take up significant technical ownership for Coursera in these areas: service architecture, product API development, data modeling, and more. Our backend developers mostly work with modern Java (16+), MySQL, DynamoDB, gRPC, GraphQL (DGS), Kafka, and more within a microservices architecture.

Responsibilities:

• Design and implement scalable systems and infrastructures
• Measure your work thoroughly, analyze results, and generate hypotheses to drive new product changes through A/B testing
• Setup monitoring and testing of your APIs and services to better understand real time health of your products

Basic Qualifications:

• 5+ years of experience working in a relevant software engineering role
• Expertise in designing highly-scalable and performant micro-services and storage layers using common frameworks, languages, and infrastructure (e.g. Java, Play/Scala, MySql, Cassandra, Solr, Kafka)
• Comfortable working in a fast-moving team environment (we deploy many times a day)
• Data-driven and strongly motivated by success and learnings through experiments and metrics analysis

If this opportunity interests you, you might like these courses on Coursera:

• Object Oriented Java Programming: Data Structures and Beyond Specialization
• Object Oriented Programming in Java Specialization
• Introduction to Programming with Python and Java Specialization
• Functional Programming in Scala Specialization

Compensation
US Zone 1: This role is not available in Zone 1

US Zone 2: From $150,800 to $188,500

US Zone 3: This role is not available in Zone 3

US Zone 4: This role is not available in Zone 4

The range(s) listed above is the expected annual base salary for this role, subject to change.

Salary is just one component of Coursera's total rewards package. All regular employees are also eligible for a bonus program and equity in the form of RSU's.

A number of factors are taken into account when determining pay, which includes: job level, location, training/education, business need, skill set and internal equity.

Current Zone Locations:
Compensation for this role is location-based using four U.S. pay zones:

• US-Z1: San Francisco Bay Area
• US-Z2: NYC and Seattle Metro
• US-Z3: California (outside of SF Bay Area), Colorado, Connecticut, Washington DC, Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maryland, NY/NJ (other than NYC), Oregon, Rhode Island, Texas, Virginia, Washington (other than Seattle)
• US-Z4: Alaska, Arizona, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Wisconsin

Base pay aligns to your zone and will also reflect your experience and role level. Your recruiter will confirm your zone and the applicable range early in the process; we disclose pay ranges where required.

Coursera is an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer and considers all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, marital status, national origin, protected veteran status, disability, or any other legally protected class.

If you are an individual with a disability and require a reasonable accommodation to complete any part of the application process, please contact us at

For California Candidates, please review our CCPA Applicant Notice here.

For our Global Candidates, please review our GDPR Recruitment Notice here.