Sr. Platform Engineer

About Quizlet:

Inspired by our belief that anyone can learn anything and powered by our own curiosity, we build the smartest tools we can imagine to help students learn.

Quizlet is the popular, global learning platform and app that millions of students, teachers and everyday people use to study any subject imaginable for school, work or as part of their personal interests -- including two-thirds of high school students and half of all college students in the US. Combining cognitive science and machine learning, Quizlet guides students through adaptive study activities to confidently reach their learning goals. We’re on track to become the undisputed leader in user-generated learning content and engagement, at the scale of YouTube.

Valued at $1 billion, Quizlet has raised over $60 million in venture capital from investors including Icon Ventures, Union Square Ventures, General Atlantic, Costanoa Ventures, Owl Ventures, and Altos Ventures.

To serve our global community of learners, our teams tackle lofty technical challenges and design for use cases across cultures and languages. We work hard, act like owners, and collaborate every chance we get. We’re energized by the potential to power more learners through multiple approaches and various tools.

About the Team:

Quizlet’s Platform Engineering team gets big things done. We are a team of curious individuals with experience in backend software engineering, traffic shaping, distributed systems, developer experience, infrastructure engineering, and related reliability. We love to solve scaling challenges as code and strive to build resilient distributed systems that scale while enabling feature velocity. We build, evolve, and operate tools, frameworks, and infrastructure that handle application delivery from source to production. 

Currently, we run production in Kubernetes and continue to modernize other parts of the infrastructure using cloud-native technologies. To automate application delivery and all things infrastructure, we follow the gitOps philosophy to perform continuous delivery and infrastructure as Code (IaC) practices. Additionally, we follow Agile development methodologies to plan our projects. 

Quizlet embraces a philosophy of service ownership by empowering service developers to build highly observable, reliable, and resilient services.

About the Role:

As a Sr. Platform Engineer, you will work on strategic projects to figure out solutions to continue making our systems more resilient as we move to a service-oriented architecture.

This role requires a strong partnership with the Product Engineering and Technical Infrastructure teams. You’ll be working on strategic projects aiming to increase service reliability, improve observability, and safe/rapid service delivery while ensuring feature velocity and cost efficiency. An enabler of repeatable processes, you will contribute to building, extending or improving existing tools and frameworks that not only reduce toil. Additionally, you will enable Quizlet teams to perform tasks more swiftly, securely, and reliably. Our charter is "To deliver a performant and delightful customer experience on a low-friction platform for developers."

This is a hybrid role based out of our Denver, Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, and San Francisco office hubs.

In this role, you will:

• Collaborate on projects for larger initiatives that enable Quizlet’s growth.
• Contribute to key projects that solve feature velocity, scaling, performance, and infrastructure problems
• Improve our ability to understand and respond to the performance of our systems
• Enhance service insights and observability that tell us details about our traffic patterns
• Use a combination of skills in systems and software engineering, configuration management, and networking to build and run distributed, fault-tolerant software systems and infrastructure to create reusable services and modularized infrastructure components
• Drive automation to reduce toil
• Be in the thick of solving problems of running systems at scale
• Support production by participating in our on-call rotation

What you bring to the table:

• 5+ years of experience as a Platform Engineer building and enabling the creation of scalable, observable, and resilient distributed services in cloud native infrastructure environments
• You feel energized by solving unique problems 
• Passionate about automation and building resilient products
• Enthusiasm for building software and system integrations to bridge the gaps between our core infrastructure and the software we deliver to our customers
• Proficiency with containers, Kubernetes and Terraform
• You're fluent in at least one of our languages (GoLang and/or Python) and willing to dive into other languages as needed
• Familiarity with incident management/response best practices with large-scale distributed systems
• A systematic problem-solving approach, coupled with good communication skills and a strong sense of ownership
• Ability to work across team boundaries to identify and solve pain points that affect engineering velocity, system resilience, system/service performance

Bonus points if you have:

• Significant production experience with Kubernetes at a very large scale
• Familiarity using service mesh implementations with a proxy (Istio, LinkerD, Envoy)
• Expertise in building platforms that enable services to be delivered via software to enable Product teams to be self-sufficient and operate the services they own
• Familiarity with Hashicorp products like TFCloud
• Proficiency with Google Cloud Platform
• Exposure to gRPC, distributed tracing, microservices

Compensation, Benefits & Perks:

• Quizlet is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. Salary transparency helps to mitigate unfair hiring practices when it comes to discrimination and pay gaps. Total compensation for this role is market competitive, including a starting base salary of $130,000 - $185,000, depending on location and experience, as well as company stock options
• Collaborate with your manager and team to create a healthy work-life balance
• 20 vacation days (and we expect you to take them!)
• Competitive health, dental, and vision insurance (100% employee and 75% dependent PPO, HMO, 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, Wellness benefits
• 40 hours of annual paid time off to participate in volunteer programs of choice

We strive to make everyone feel comfortable and welcome! 

We work to create a holistic interview process, where both Quizlet and candidates have an opportunity to view what it would be like to work together, in exploring a mutually beneficial partnership.

We provide a transparent setting, that gives a comprehensive view of who we are!

In Closing:

We hope you are excited about everything you read so far. We highly encourage you to apply for this position, even if you feel you do not meet all the requirements. Quizlet is always looking for amazing folks that believe in our mission and can contribute to our team in various ways - not merely candidates that fit a certain mold.

We have a bias for action, take initiative, and take pride in delivering results. We make informed decisions whenever possible but are unafraid to take calculated risks on great ideas to promote learning. We embrace challenges and see effort as the path to mastery. We’re constantly seeking opportunities to learn and we embrace curiosity. Quality matters at Quizlet, and we hold the bar high on everything we do.

We treat each other with honesty and respect, encourage vigorous debate, and seek critical feedback. We value diversity, humility, transparency, and collaboration as the best paths to our success — as individuals, as a team, and as a company.

Quizlet’s success as an online learning community depends on a strong commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. We are actively working to build a team that is representative of the diverse communities we serve, and an open, inclusive work environment where all employees can thrive. As an equal opportunity employer and a tech company committed to societal change, we welcome applicants from all backgrounds. Women, people of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, individuals with disabilities, and veterans are strongly encouraged to apply. Come join us!

To All Recruiters and Placement Agencies:

At this time Quizlet does not accept unsolicited agency resumes and/or profiles. 

Please do not forward unsolicited agency resumes to our website or to any Quizlet employee. Quizlet will not pay fees to any third-party agency or firm nor will it be responsible for any agency fees associated with unsolicited resumes. All unsolicited resumes received will be considered the property of Quizlet.