Senior Staff Software Engineer, Consumer Experiences

Quizlet • San Francisco, CA

4d • Onsite

About The Position

At Quizlet, our mission is to help every learner achieve their outcomes in the most effective and delightful way. Our $1B+ learning platform serves tens of millions of students every month, including two-thirds of U.S. high schoolers and half of U.S. college students, powering over 2 billion learning interactions monthly.

We blend cognitive science with machine learning to personalize and enhance the learning experience for students, professionals, and lifelong learners alike. We’re energized by the potential to power more learners through multiple approaches and various tools.

Let’s Build the Future of Learning
Join us to design and deliver AI-powered learning tools that scale across the world and unlock human potential.

About the Team:

Quizlet's Engineering organization builds the core experiences that help millions of students and teachers achieve their learning goals. We collaborate across teams to achieve user-centric outcomes, focusing on developing intuitive interfaces, engaging learning tools, and robust, scalable systems.

You’ll be joining a passionate group of engineers, designers, product managers, and data scientists dedicated to solving real-world educational challenges. Our teams operate with autonomy, embrace experimentation, and are deeply committed to user-centric design. We value transparency, inclusivity, and collaboration at all levels.

About the Role:

We’re looking for a Senior Staff Engineer to lead the technical design, implementation and delivery of user-facing features that are critical to Quizlet’s success. As a Senior Staff Engineer, you’ll operate across multiple teams, driving complex initiatives, engineering excellence, and build systems that serve millions of learners globally. This role may span consumer web experiences, mobile platforms, or a blend of both — flexibility and broad technical context are key.

We’re happy to share that this is an onsite position in our San Francisco office. To help foster team collaboration, we require that employees be in the office a minimum of three days per week: Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday and as needed by your manager or the company. We believe that this working environment facilitates increased work efficiency, team partnership, and supports growth as an employee and organization.

Requirements

• 10+ years of engineering experience building global-scale distributed systems or platforms
• Proven ability to lead cross-functional technical initiatives with long-term business impact
• Strong experience building systems using backend technologies such as Java, Kotlin, Golang and/or Front-end technologies such as React, Angular and/or mobile application development experience on iOS, Android
• Deep architectural expertise in large-scale systems with a focus on performance, reliability, and iteration speed
• Strong communication and mentorship skills, with the ability to influence both engineers and executives
• Experience aligning engineering execution with company-level priorities and OKRs
• Experience working with existing systems or approaches that are limiting and successfully driving improvements toward more scalable, reliable, or maintainable solutions

Nice To Haves

• Experience building and scaling education-focused or consumer-facing apps or subscription platforms
• Worked in environments with high data and performance requirements
• Designed systems that are mobile-first products, multi-platform, and incorporating Server Driven UI
• Hands-on involvement in incident management or operational engineering practices
• Full stack experience with exposure to backend systems, web and mobile clients

Responsibilities

• Lead Cross-Team Technical Strategy: Drive tech architecture, implementation and delivery across multiple engineering teams focused on subscriptions, payments, and ads.
• Operate in Ambiguity: Navigate vague problem spaces, identify the highest-leverage opportunities, and create clarity across engineering and cross-functional teams.
• Drive Systemic and Operational Excellence: Architect systems that are scalable, secure, compliant, and resilient—building highly available and observable services with high bars for uptime, latency, and data consistency.
• Collaborate Across Functions: Partner with product, design, data science, finance, legal, and external vendors to deliver high-impact monetization features and infrastructure.
• Contribute to Tech Roadmaps: Align technical strategy with product, business, and growth goals—shaping roadmaps that scale systems and increase revenue.
• Mentor and Scale Teams: Coach engineers and uplift team capabilities through strong technical guidance and by fostering a culture of autonomy and self-sufficiency.
• Partner & Vendor Collaboration: Work with external vendors, legal, finance, and compliance teams to ensure technical alignment and business success.

Benefits

• Collaborate with your manager and team to create a healthy work-life balance
• 20 vacation days that we expect you to take!
• Competitive health, dental, and vision insurance (100% employee and 75% dependent PPO, Dental, VSP Choice)
• Employer-sponsored 401k plan with company match
• Access to LinkedIn Learning and other resources to support professional growth
• Paid Family Leave, FSA, HSA, Commuter benefits, and Wellness benefits
• 40 hours of annual paid time off to participate in volunteer programs of choice

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed