Staff 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. 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 a 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.

The
C4C Integrations team's mission
is to accelerate growth and impact for Coursera's enterprise and degree businesses by building seamless integrations with external platforms. This includes ensuring that Coursera's content is easily discoverable and consumable across a wide range of Learning Management Systems (LMS) and Learning Experience Platforms (LXP), while providing a unified and frictionless user experience.

For enterprises, this means integrating Coursera with partner LMS/LXP platforms to streamline content discovery and learning experiences. For LMS integrations, the team focuses on
LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability)
standards, which allow our partners to seamlessly use external tools (e.g., grading platforms, coding IDEs) within Coursera and vice versa. By leveraging these integrations, Coursera can extend its learning platform's capabilities without building everything in-house—accelerating degree launches and significantly enhancing learner and partner experiences.

As an engineer on this team, you will have the opportunity to work on complex technical challenges in distributed systems, API design, and scalable integration infrastructure. You will work closely with cross-functional stakeholders across product, design, QA, solution architects, and engineering peers. You must be comfortable working in a fast-moving environment (we deploy many times a day) and excited to influence the roadmap of a high-impact team.

Responsibilities

• Design and develop scalable integrations between Coursera and external LMS/LXP platforms, ensuring seamless interoperability and great learner/administrator experiences.
• Implement LTI-compliant integrations to allow partners to use external tools (e.g., grading systems, coding IDEs) within Coursera, extending platform functionality without duplicating effort.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams (Product, Solution Architects, UX Design, QA, Data Engineering, Infrastructure, SRE) to build, test, and deploy integration features.
• Stay updated with industry standards in LMS/LXP, LTI, and enterprise SaaS integrations to proactively propose new capabilities that enhance Coursera's ecosystem.
• Write and review technical documentation for integration components and APIs.
• Develop and deploy high-quality code (in Java, Scala, or similar languages) following industry best practices and monitor key service-level indicators (SLIs).
• Debug and fix production issues, lead blameless retrospectives, and participate in the on-call rotation to ensure adherence to service-level agreements (SLAs).
• Mentor and collaborate with peers, contributing to technical excellence and a strong engineering culture within the team.

Basic Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in backend software engineering roles.
• Experience designing and delivering complex, cross-functional integrations or enterprise-scale systems.
• Proficient in designing distributed systems, APIs, and writing automated tests.
• Expertise in building highly scalable microservices and storage layers using common frameworks, languages, and infrastructure (e.g., Java, Play/Scala, MySQL, ElasticSearch, Kafka).
• Experience working with managed cloud services and streaming technologies.
• Strong ability to conduct technical research and design long-term solutions to complex business problems.
• Commitment to engineering quality, scalability, and building leverage for other teams.
• Data-driven approach with a strong motivation to measure success and learn through metrics and experiments.
• Proven ability to mentor team members and set a strong engineering culture.

Preferred Qualifications

• Prior experience working with LTI integrations or enterprise SaaS ecosystem integrations.
• Familiarity with LMS/LXP platforms (e.g., Canvas, Blackboard, Moodle, SAP SuccessFactors, Degreed).
• Experience building secure and compliant integrations for enterprise customers.
• Track record of delivering high-impact results in resource-constrained environments.
• Ability to influence stakeholders and advocate effectively for integration roadmaps with or without formal authority.
• Strong collaboration skills with technical and non-technical teams to deliver business impact.
• Demonstrated ability to thrive in a fast-paced, dynamic environment and navigate ambiguity with confidence.

You will collaborate closely with product managers, designers, and data scientists to solve challenging technical problems, shape the product roadmap, and deliver intuitive, high-impact admin experiences that directly influence how enterprises deploy and manage Coursera's learning solutions.

• If this opportunity interests you, you might like these courses on Coursera: Java Object Oriented Specialization

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.