Job Overview:

Skills and Credentials Team Overview: 
The Skills and Credentials team builds the foundational engine that connects Coursera's content to real-world career outcomes. Our mission is to create the scalable systems that define, map, and track skills across the entire learning journey. We are the architects of the data and infrastructure that enable skill-based learning, credentialing, and career pathways for millions of learners and thousands of enterprise partners.

The team focuses on several key areas:
Core Skills Taxonomy & Mapping: Building the foundational services that generate and map skills across our content library. This involves creating a structured ontology of skills, occupations, and career levels to make our content discoverable, relevant, and aligned with real-world job requirements.

Skill Progression & Signaling Infrastructure: Capture and process "skill signals" from across the learning experience to provide learners with clear, actionable insights into their skill development and readiness for assessment.

Scalable and Future-Proof Architecture: Ensuring the long-term scalability, reliability, and evolution of the skills platform. This includes collaborating with product and data teams to define the technical roadmap and making critical architectural decisions that will support Coursera's future ambitions in credentialing and personalized learning.

As the Engineering Manager for the Skills and Credentials team, you will lead a full-stack engineering team responsible for creating these critical capabilities. Your role involves technical leadership, architectural guidance, close collaboration with cross-functional stakeholders, and driving strategic initiatives to deliver scalable, innovative solutions aligned with Coursera’s broader strategic goals. You will foster a high-performance team culture, encourage innovation, and ensure operational excellence, directly contributing to Coursera's mission of delivering impactful, high-quality learning experiences worldwide.

Responsibilities:

• Building the Team: Partner with cross-functional stakeholders (Product, Design, Machine Learning, Data Science, Teaching and Learning) to refine the team’s charter, ensure alignment with broader business goals, and support overall team health and growth.
• Mentoring: Act as a role model and coach for engineers. Conduct career development conversations, provide constructive feedback, and inspire engineers to achieve their best.
• Hiring: Identify key skill gaps and growth areas on the team. Drive the hiring pipeline by sourcing, interviewing, and onboarding talented engineers to build a well-rounded, high-performing team.
• Advising (Technical Leadership): Provide hands-on technical guidance to engineers as they design systems and tackle complex problems. Encourage sound architectural decisions and help team members grow into technical leaders in their product work.
• Product Enablement: In partnership with Product Management, curate a compelling vision for Skills and Credentials. Translate high-level product needs into an actionable engineering roadmap. Prioritize and drive key initiatives forward, run sprint planning and stand-ups, and ensure the team delivers product features that delight content creators and learners.
• Platform Leadership: Balance building new features with managing tech debt to maintain a reliable, scalable platform. Evolve the content authoring platform for high leverage – architect systems and services that can accelerate multiple product initiatives across Coursera. Ensure consistency and quality in the user experience by creating reusable components and frameworks for content.
• Mediating: Foster an inclusive, collaborative team environment. Proactively address interpersonal issues and facilitate crucial conversations with empathy and fairness. Ensure every team member feels empowered, engaged, and comfortable sharing ideas and concerns.

Basic Qualifications: 

• Education & Experience: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field, OR equivalent practical experience (e.g. 3+ years as a hands-on software engineer building web applications or distributed systems).
• Industry Experience: 5+ years in software product development or a related field, including prior experience leading engineering teams (2+ years in an engineering management role). You should have a proven track record of delivering software projects and managing cross-functional development teams.
• Technical Background: Strong software engineering foundation with experience in system design, data structures, and algorithms. (You should have professional coding/development experience in your background, even if this role is not an IC position.)

Preferred Qualifications:

• Leadership: Demonstrated integrity, transparency, and inspiration in your leadership style. Ability to empower and motivate a team to achieve ambitious goals.
• Emotional Intelligence: High degree of empathy, humility, and effective communication skills. Experience building inclusive team cultures and handling interpersonal dynamics with patience and tact.
• Problem Solving: Creative and analytical mindset with rigorous technical problem-solving skills. Ability to navigate complexity and guide the team to well-reasoned, innovative solutions.
• Thriving in Ambiguity: Excellence in driving clarity and results in ambiguous, complex situations. Boldness and grit to chart a path forward even when the way is not fully defined.
• Product & Platform Vision: Experience balancing rapid product feature delivery with long-term platform health. Proven ability to manage technical debt and invest in platform infrastructure that yields high leverage across multiple products or use cases.
• Platform Ownership: Experience managing a team that owns a product platform or critical infrastructure component. Ideally, you have firsthand experience defining the team’s charter and boundaries of ownership, especially in the context of evolving a new platform.
• Experience with Generative AI applications including prompt engineering and using APIs such as OpenAI, Claude, or Gemini.
• Scalable Systems Expertise: Demonstrated experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems, using modern backend technologies such as Java or Scala and API frameworks like GraphQL and gRPC. You understand how to design systems for high availability, performance, and maintainability at scale.
• Full-Stack Familiarity: Familiarity with modern frontend technologies (React, TypeScript, or similar) and how front-end interfaces integrate with backend services. While depth in one area (backend or frontend) is expected, the ability to understand and guide end-to-end system architecture is highly valued.

If you are excited about enabling educators to create content that reaches hundreds of millions of learners around the globe, and you have the technical and leadership skills to drive a high-impact engineering team, we’d love to hear from you!

Compensation:

Coursera offers competitive pay and fair compensation practices across all regions. Job titles may span multiple career levels, and the targeted hiring base salary range for this role in Canada is CAD $158,400-  $198,000. Actual compensation will depend on factors such as experience, education, transferable skills, business needs, and location. This range may be adjusted over time and may include eligibility for variable pay, equity, and comprehensive benefits.

Keep Learning

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

• Generative AI for Everyone
• Generative AI Leadership and Strategy Specialization
• Learning how to learn