Software Engineer - Backend Engineering (Instructor Team)

Udemy is an AI-powered skills acceleration platform built to help people and teams grow. It’s personalized, practical, and focused on real-world impact.

Our mission is simple: to transform lives through learning. Your work helps people around the world build skills they can use, whether they’re picking up something new or leveling up to stay ahead.

Over 80 million learners and 17,000 businesses already learn with Udemy. If you’re excited by change, energized by learning, and ready to have a real impact, you’ll feel right at home.

Learn more about us on our company page.

About You

You’re an analytical problem-solver ready to put your skills toward purposeful work that has a global impact. You want to lead the way in innovation, exploring the latest technologies and finding new solutions. You thrive in a collaborative environment and are eager to work with and learn alongside the best in Product, Design, and Engineering.

About your Skills

• Adaptability and Curiosity – You’re eager to learn new technologies, embrace change, and grow in a dynamic environment. You ask thoughtful questions and seek out opportunities to expand your knowledge.
• Collaboration and Communication – You can work well in a team, share your ideas clearly, listen actively, and contribute to a positive, supportive culture. You’re comfortable giving and receiving feedback to improve both yourself and the team.
• Ownership – You take initiative and follow through on your responsibilities, whether you're contributing to a larger project or owning a specific feature end-to-end. You care about delivering quality work, ask for help when needed, and take pride in seeing your code reach real users. Your sense of ownership helps build trust across the team.

About the Role

The Instructor Content Opportunities (ICO) team at Udemy is dedicated to building platforms and tools that help instructors succeed—whether they’re creating courses, assessing learners, or managing their content. We work on foundational systems and other instructor-facing experiences that directly impact how instructors teach and how learners learn. Our goal is to empower instructors to deliver high-quality learning experiences while continually improving engagement, satisfaction, and outcomes for learners around the world.

As a Software Engineer on Udemy’s Instructor team, you’ll contribute to the development of backend systems that power our instructor-facing products. You’ll work closely with senior engineers and cross-functional partners to build reliable, scalable services that support instructors in creating high-quality learning experiences.

While your initial focus may be within the instructor content space, you’ll have the opportunity to work on a variety of instructor-related initiatives across the organization. Your work will help drive instructor success and improve learner outcomes, contributing to Udemy’s mission of transforming lives through learning.

This is a great opportunity for a motivated engineer to take the next step in their career by making meaningful contributions to the design and development of Udemy’s backend systems. In this role, you’ll not only support ongoing projects but also take sole responsibility for specific components and features, seeing them through from design to deployment. You’ll work on impactful, production-level systems that directly serve our global instructor community, all within a supportive team that values ownership, collaboration, mentorship, and continuous learning. If you're ready to grow while building real, lasting impact—this is the place to do it.

What you’ll be doing

• Designing, developing, and maintaining applications that empower instructors to create high-quality content and learning products.
• Take ownership of specific components or features, driving them from development to deployment with guidance from senior engineers.
• Collaborate with product managers, designers, and other engineers to ensure seamless backend–frontend integration, supporting intuitive and impactful instructor experiences.
• Help modernize and improve legacy systems by contributing to refactoring efforts and tech debt reduction.
• Implementing secure and scalable backend services and APIs, focusing on ensuring seamless front-end integration via GraphQL, supporting real-time content discovery tools, and instructor-facing interfaces.
• Write clear, maintainable, and well-tested code, and participate in code reviews to uphold engineering best practices.
• Actively participate in agile ceremonies (e.g., stand-ups, sprint planning, retrospectives) and contribute to team collaboration and continuous improvement.
• Learn from and work closely with senior engineers to develop technical depth and expand your architectural understanding over time.

What you’ll have

• B.S. degree or higher in Computer Science or a related technical field.
• 1-2 years of full-time engineering experience
• Strong experience designing and building distributed systems, microservices, and service-oriented architectures.
• Solid understanding of object-oriented programming and backend fundamentals.
• Hands-on experience building backend services using modern programming languages and frameworks (we use Kotlin and Python, but any comparable experience is welcome).
• Familiarity with building and consuming secure, performant, and reliable APIs, including experience with REST and gRPC/Protobuf.
• Exposure to database design and working with relational or NoSQL databases.
• Bonus: Familiarity with event-driven systems (e.g., Kafka, Redis) and frontend fundamentals is a plus.
• A growth mindset and strong interest in scalable backend systems and distributed architectures.
• Ability to write clean, maintainable code and an understanding of basic testing practices.
• Willingness to take responsibility, collaborate across teams, and continuously learn.
• Effective communication skills and a collaborative attitude—comfortable asking questions, seeking feedback, and aligning with shared team goals.
• A passion for building solutions that empower instructors and enhance the learning experience on a global scale.

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