Why Udacity matters
Higher education, in its current state, is woefully broken. We’re working on fixing it from the ground up -- beyond democratizing access to education, regardless of geography or socioeconomic status, we’re fundamentally rethinking how education is delivered. Our mission is to empower our students to not just advance their education, but their career opportunities, and to make education relevant for the 21st century.
Our classes seek to present traditionally “hard” subjects in an engaging, accessible way that emphasizes understanding over memorization. In 2 short years we’ve been able to make significant strides including:
- Comprehensive set of CS classes covering everything from intro courses to algorithms, parallel programming, and cryptography
- Branching out into other disciplines (bio, psych, physics, design)
- Hundreds of thousands of students in over 200 countries with thousands of new students signing up every day
And we recently partnered with Georgia Tech to offer the world’s first accredited, top-notch CS master’s degree completely online for a fraction of the price.
We’re far from done, and if you’re an amazing full stack engineer, we need your help.
What you’ll be working on
As an engineer working here, even if you're not in front of the camera teaching a course (tell us if you’re interested though!), the work you put in directly affects Udacity's pedagogy. We’re driven by the desire to put our students first, and this mission informs everything we do, from providing input into our computer science curriculum to deciding what to build next.
Stuff we’ve worked on/are working on includes:
- building out a classroom framework that lets our students switch between hundreds of videos, quizzes, and programming environments without ever reloading the page
- sandboxed code execution that supports everything from our students’ first Python programs to data analysis in R to hacking on GPUs in C++
- rolling out a new style framework for our whole site
- versatile ways to grade student submissions, including everything from simple answers to large, multi-file projects and exams that adjust their difficulty to students’ performance
- an easy-to-use internal content editor (the thing that our course developers use to create classes quickly) with real-time collaboration capability
We’re always eager to incorporate the best new technologies into our stack, and the bulk of the work we do revolves around building new features (rather than iterating on old ones).
Btw, our stack consists of AngularJS w/ Bootstrap and LESS in the front, Python on Google App Engine in the back, and MongoDB for collecting analytics. If you want to learn more about how we do things, check out http://qr.ae/NuSm7
Share your projects/work with us
In your cover letter, please describe a project, tell us what you are passionate about, or share links to your code samples. These should be examples that you are very proud of!