Software Engineer (Interactives)

About Brilliant

Brilliant's mission is to create a world of better problem solvers. We make games for learning in math, science, computer science, and data analysis, for iOS, Android, and web. On Brilliant, you learn by doing – there are no videos, everything is interactive. We get you hands-on, figuring things out on your own. We help learners develop intuition through interaction, build understanding through experimentation, and have fun.

We serve hundreds of thousands of paid subscribers, and we’re hoping you might be the right person to contribute to accelerating our footprint to millions of customers (and changed lives). In addition to what’s below, you can see all open roles and learn more about our team culture on our careers page.

We have always prioritized building a healthy business as the backbone of achieving our mission. We are default alive (will be profitable before needing to raise), don't over-hire, are growing new customers at an exciting pace (high double-digits year-over-year). Our investors are top-tier + mission aligned, and we’ve kept our valuations tethered to reality – we aren’t playing “catch up” like many others.

In our day-to-day, we value adventure, excellence, generosity, and candor. We are optimists in the face of uncertainty, we take pride in our work, we go the extra mile for each other, and we tell it like it is (the good and the bad). We’re all here to do the best work of our lives together, and have a lot of fun along the way. 

We believe that real-time collaboration and human connection are necessary ingredients in building a high-velocity, creatively-oriented consumer product. We maintain core hours (10am - 3pm Pacific) where everyone is online, regardless of timezone. Over half of us are located near our hubs in SF and NYC, and folks outside of those cities travel to attend team offsites once-per-quarter.

The Role

Engineers at Brilliant work in small, elite teams alongside colleagues from Product, Design, and Content. As an interactive engineer, you’ll build games that teach.

Our games blend thoughtful mechanics, intuitive level design, and deep pedagogical insights. Each game is driven by APIs designed for experts and LLMs where every possible configuration is 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 games at scale, helping our learners to get the reps they need to achieve mastery. With your help, we'll build the next 1,000 learning games to teach all of STEM.

Check out these blog posts to learn more:

- Hand-crafted, machine-made: How we make learning games with AI

- When “almost right” is catastrophically wrong: Evals for AI learning games

Responsibilities

• Develop new educational games that captivate learners and make foundational concepts addictive to master.
• Expand our world-class universe of interactive building blocks designed to be composed in the next generation of learning games.
• Build clear and expressive APIs designed for experts and AIs.
• Own the technical implementation of games 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 3 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 new levels of productivity.
• 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.

Our Engineering Team

Brilliant's engineering team is small, elite, and AI-enabled. We believe in moving fast, fixing faster, and optimizing for outcomes over outputs. Our team is full of former founders, early employees, and engineering leaders turned ICs whose collective drive, judgement, and standards generate a palpable sense of momentum every day. The norm on this team is doing the very best work of our careers, and we both support and challenge each other every day to do exactly that.

Compensation and Benefits

We use a systematic compensation framework: salary scales are set each year for each job vertical, managers level folks on their team, and those levels are mapped directly to our compensation scales. A location-based adjustment is applied outside of SF and NYC (typically 5-10%) - feel free to ask us about your location!

Given the systematic approach, we always make First and Best offers - there is no negotiation (for new hires nor our existing teammates). This ensures people are paid based on their expected contribution, not their negotiation skills.

We offer top-notch health care plans, with 100% of the premiums covered for medical, dental, and vision for employees. About 1/3 of our team are parents, and we provide generous parental leave + up to $1900/mo in dependent healthcare coverage.

We offer flexible PTO, with a norm of taking off about 6 weeks per year (including federal holidays). We also provide home office equipment, a professional development stipend, and free food at our offices.

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