Senior Software Engineer, Backend
- India
- Engineering
Coursera was launched in 2012 by Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller with a mission to provide universal access to world-class learning. It is now one of the largest online learning platforms in the world, with 183 million registered learners as of June 30, 2025. Coursera partners with over 350 leading university and industry partners to offer a broad catalog of content and credentials, including courses, Specializations, Professional Certificates, and degrees. Coursera’s platform innovations enable instructors to deliver scalable, personalized, and verified learning experiences to their learners. Institutions worldwide rely on Coursera to upskill and reskill their employees, citizens, and students in high-demand fields such as GenAI, data science, technology, and business. 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:
Coursera is bootstrapping a new development center, with a focus on building a platform team in India. This is an unique opportunity to be part of the founding team that would not only own a mission critical charter, but also play a significant role in shaping the culture for the location. We are looking for individuals with an entrepreneurial mindset who are excited by the prospect of building impactful 0 to 1 products.
You’ll work on core features such as user and role management, contract setup and tracking, admin-led communications, skills planning tools, and detailed reporting dashboards. The team also owns integrations and APIs that connect Coursera to external LMS/LXP systems and helps streamline enterprise onboarding and ongoing support.
This role involves close collaboration with product managers, designers, QA, and cross-functional engineering teams including data, infrastructure, and SRE. You’ll help reduce operational overhead by building internal tools for Customer Success and Implementation teams, and play a key role in improving platform reliability, real-time analytics, and admin support ticket resolution.
Responsibilities:
- Design and implement scalable & robust APIs and Systems
- Measure your work thoroughly, analyze results, and generate hypotheses to drive new product changes through A/B testing
- Write and review technical documentation for the components owned by your team
- Develop and deploy your high-quality code (in Java, Scala or similar languages) following industry best practices and track key service level indicators (SLIs)
- Debug and fix production issues, lead blameless retrospectives, and participate in the on-call rotation to ensure adherence to the service level agreements (SLAs)
- Collaborate and mentor team members, and contribute to teams' success improving processes
Basic Qualifications:
- 5-10 years of experience working in a relevant backend software engineering role
- Proficient in implementing APIs and writing automated tests
- Expertise in using managed cloud services, streaming technologies and handling large data sets
- Prior experience in developing new features and debugging complex issues with minimal supervision
- Fervent belief in engineering quality and building technical leverage for others
- Data-driven and strongly motivated by success and learnings through experiments and metrics analysis
Preferred Qualifications:
- Founding engineers or candidates with prior experience in start-up environments are preferred, specifically those who have been part of a bootstrapping team, small start-up team, or expansion team.
- Demonstrated ability to work in a fast-paced and dynamic environment, and navigate through ambiguity and uncertainty with confidence.
- Experience collaborating with cross-functional teams to deliver high-quality products or services.
- Proven track record of delivering results in a resource-constrained environment with limited guidance and supervision.
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