- Do single points of failure keep you up at night?
- Are you latency sensitive?
- Do you hate repeating yourself?
- Do you read JVM byte code for fun? Language specifications? Technical research papers?
- Does your entire test suite take seconds to run?
- When you find a process hanging in production, do you 'kill -9' it or do you starting digging through thread and heap dumps?
- Would you like to employ your 1337 engineering skills to make education more affordable, accessible and scalable?
If you "get" most of these questions, then read on to learn more about Coursera's infrastructure team. We build the core services and plumbing that enable Coursera to serve thousands of courses from top universities to millions of students around the world for free. We build awesome tools to help our developers build, deploy and test their software. We operate and constantly monitor the site; though, we're always striving to automate ourselves out of our own job in that regard.
Things we've built recently
- Play/Scala-based service stack, including "Courservice", our next-generation class platform
- Push-button, cloud deployment tools
- Full-stack auto-scaling on AWS
- Scalable message delivery to millions of students
- Extensive site monitoring
What's next? Or, what will you be working on?
We've got some big projects in the pipeline and would love to have you come build them with us!
- App Platform: Make Coursera more open and extensible through REST APIs, deep platform integration and open learning standards
- Social Learning: Build backend systems to support groups, social graphs and more
- Event Pipeline: Enable near-realtime, data-driven products built on big data streams
- Data Systems: Work on next-generation distributed data systems that solve novel product use cases in the education space, while enabling us to scale our platform to 100x what it is today
Tech stack
- JVM-based services via Play/Scala/Zookeeper
- Amazon Web Services: Sharded RDS (MySQL), CloudSearch, CloudFront, S3, EC2, SQS, SES, EMR, ELB, XYZ, OMG!
- LinkedIn's Kafka
- Lots of open source frameworks/libraries: typesafe stack, curator, guice, metrics and more
- Served through a modern frontend stack (backbone.js) built by our rockstar Product team